There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  28 Ann Sweet Appleton to Sarah Appleton, Jan. 8, 1847; quoted in Eisler, Lowell Offering, p. 19.

  29 Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, pp. 38 and 45.

  30 Tom Juravich, William F. Hartford, and James R. Green, Commonwealth of Toil: Chapters in the History of Massachusetts Workers and Their Unions (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 8.

  31 Anthony Trollope, North America, vol. 1 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970; originally published 1862), p. 309. The author conducted more than just a cursory tour of Lowell, closely examining the boardinghouses, inquiring into the mills’ output, and interviewing the factory owners. Astonished by the robust health and spirit of the young mill hands, he concluded the town functioned more as a “philanthropical manufacturing college” than a business enterprise, and in its superiority to anything comparable in England he declared it “the realization of a commercial Utopia.” He cautioned, however, that changes in the availability of Southern cotton and a transition from water to steam power might soon render conditions at Lowell less satisfactory. See Trollope, North America, vol. 1, pp. 304–14.

  32 Massachusetts Spy, March 8, 1820; quoted in Caroline F. Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture: A Study in Industrial Beginnings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), p. 203.

  33 “ ‘She has worked in a factory’ is sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl”—Orestes Brownson quoted in Zaroulis, “Daughters of Freemen,” p. 110.

  34 Larcom, “Among the Mill Girls: A Reminiscence.” Larcom, who was a favorite of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, went on to a distinguished career as a poet and essayist. Her 1889 memoir, “A New England Girlhood,” became a classic account of childhood in the nineteenth century. A mountain in New Hampshire was named in her honor.

  35 Edward Everett, “Fourth of July at Lowell (1830),” in The Philosophy of Manufactures: Early Debates over Industrialization in the United States, by Michael Folsom and Steven Lubar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 281–94. The factory experience, it was thought, also made Lowell girls superior wives. Everett, known as a brilliant orator and the first American to obtain a Ph.D., went on to be a U.S. senator, a secretary of state, and the governor of Massachusetts. Called to the consecration of a military cemetery after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, he is remembered for having given the two-hour speech that immediately preceded Lincoln’s eloquent three-minute Gettysburg Address, which Everett later acknowledged had been superior to his own.

  36 Josephson, Golden Threads, p. 181.

  37 Louis Taylor Merrill, “Mill Town on the Merrimack,” in New England Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 1 (March 1946).

  38 Josephson, Golden Threads, pp. 179–83.

  39 The Offering was not the sole literary magazine to emerge from the New England mills; Chicopee had The Olive Leaf and Factory Girls’ Repository; Newmarket had The Factory Girl; and Exeter its Factory Girls’ Garland, but the Offering was the only one fully written and edited by mill workers in an era when few women were active in publishing or prominent in literary affairs. (Perhaps the most famous woman editor in America at the time was Lydia Maria Child at the Anti-Slavery Standard.) Some observers assumed the Offering—in its demonstration that mill girls who toiled twelve and fourteen hours a day could enjoy an active life of the mind—was a promotional tool sponsored by the mill owners, but only once, in buying a large number of unsold copies, did the corporation financially prop up the magazine. The mill owners understood that the journal’s appeal lay in readers’ certainty that young women workers were its prime movers.

  40 Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, p. 64.

  41 Harriet Farley to Sarah Bagley, Lowell Advertiser, July 15, 1845, in Philip S. Foner, The Factory Girls: A Collection of Writings on Life and Struggle in the New England Factories of the 1840s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 63–64.

  42 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 20.

  43 Eisler, Lowell Offering, vol. 1, pp. 112–13.

  44 Josephine L. Baker, “A Second Peep at Factory Life,” in The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women, 1840–1845, ed. Benita Eisler (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998; originally published 1977), vol. 5, 1845, pp. 77–82.

  45 Yafa, Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber, pp. 95–96.

  46 Alan MacDonald, “Lowell: A Commercial Utopia,” New England Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 1937).

  47 Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds., America’s Working Women, 1600 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), p. 70.

  48 Pervis Sibley Andrews diary, Nov. 2, 1851, quoted in Laurel Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), pp. 395–96.

  49 Lise Vogel, “Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak: New England Mill Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. M. Cantor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), pp. 72–73; see also Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, pp. 266–67.

  50 There had been two earlier female strikes in New England. The first was in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, when Samuel Slater threatened to reduce wages and extend work hours. Women mill hands walked out, gaining the sympathy of their male counterparts, and also the town itself, since most of the workers were locals. At Dover, New Hampshire, in 1828, about four hundred women textile workers, angry about new company restrictions on their personal time, left work and paraded around the town. They also reportedly fired off gunpowder outside the mill. The owner retaliated by advertising in a local newspaper for “better behaved women,” while a newspaper from Philadelphia that learned of the event mocked the determination of the fairer “Yankee sex” and wondered if the governor of Massachusetts might be required to “call out the militia to prevent a gynecocracy.” See Baxandall and Gordon, America’s Working Women, pp. 68–69.

  51 Lowell Journal reprinted in Boston Transcript, Feb. 14, 1834.

  52 Cited in Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 96–97.

  53 Boston Transcript, Feb. 17, 1834; see also Dublin, Women at Work, p. 91.

  54 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 9.

  55 See Ulrich, Age of Homespun, p. 392.

  56 Lawrence Manufacturing Co. Records, Correspondence, vol. MAB-1, March 4 and March 9, 1834, at Baker Library, Harvard Business School, quoted in Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: ‘The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us,’ ” in Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, ed. M. Cantor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 52.

  57 The Mechanic, Nov. 30, 1844; italics in original.

  58 Awl, Dec. 21, 1844.

  59 Josephson, Golden Threads, p. 238.

  60 Boston Transcript, Oct. 6, 1836.

  61 Joseph H. Allen, Our Liberal Movement in Theology (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1882), p. 71; Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), p. 18.

  62 Charles M. Ellis, An Essay on Transcendental Boston (Boston: Crocker and Ruggles, 1842), p. 11; see Gura, American Transcendentalism, p. 11.

  63 Voice of Industry, June 12, 1845.

  64 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 21.

  65 Larcom, “Among Lowell Mill Girls: A Reminiscence.”

  66 Yafa, Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber, p. 122.

  67 Liberator, Jan. 1, 1831.

  68 Ibid., Jan. 29, 1831.

  69 Ibid.

  70 Liberator, Feb. 5, 1831.

  71 Fitzhugh’s books are Sociology in the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857).

  72 Undated article from Boston Bee reprinted in Awl, Sept. 4, 1844.

  73 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 23.

>   74 Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 27.

  75 Voice of Industry, Sept. 18, 1845.

  76 Gura, American Transcendentalism, p. 161.

  77 Brisbane, in presenting Fourier’s idea in America, emphasized his economic proposals while conveniently leaving out some of his teacher’s flakier notions, such as the possibility that the moon and the stars would be so gratified by the harmony of man’s reordered civilization that they would propagate in the heavens. Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed such ideas but admired Fourier as someone who “carried a whole French Revolution in his head” and had created a set of theories that linked man’s individual nature and spiritual need to economics and the survival in the real world. As Emerson had intuited, Fourier’s notions of improved social beings uniting their individual passions with work in a collective environment struck less of a chord with Americans than the more practical aspects of economic cooperation. Emerson is quoted in Gura, American Transcendentalism, p. 169.

  78 Another correspondent appearing in the Tribune at Greeley’s invitation was Karl Marx.

  79 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Brook Farm, see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/

  Brook_Farm.

  80 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, p. 21. The Lowell women also responded to the need for more comfortable women’s clothing being promoted by newspaper editor Amelia Jenks Bloomer. One Fourth of July saw a contingent of Lowell women parade to the town common in their “Bloomers,” loose trousers topped by a skirt or vest. “For myself, I confess to a liking for bloomers,” labor leader Eugene V. Debs later remarked. “They seem cool and comfortable and there is something about the air of the girl who wears them that reminds me of the Declaration of Independence.”

  81 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 336.

  82 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 81.

  83 Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 26–27.

  84 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 338.

  85 In May 1862, the South having seceded from the Union, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which offered 50- to 160-acre plots of public western land to any adult citizen who had not taken up arms against the Union, and who would cultivate the land for five years.

  86 Henry A. Miles, Lowell, As It Was, and As It Is (New York: Arno Reprint, 1972; originally published 1845), p. 2.

  87 Factory Girl, Exeter, New Hampshire, March 1, 1843, quoted in Vogel, “Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak,” pp. 76–77.

  88 Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 62.

  89 The pattern repeated itself in other cities, most notably New York, where in 1829 six thousand skilled workers launched the New York City Working Man’s Party. The mechanics’ associations that sprang up in this era were characterized by workers’ desire to win reforms related to their employ as well as broader social advances, such as an end to debtors being sent to jail, stricter regulation of convict labor and financial institutions, and free public schools.

  90 Third Grand Rally of the Workingmen of Charleston, Mass., Held Oct. 23, 1840, Kress Library, Harvard Business School (emphasis supplied), quoted in Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 308–9.

  91 “Preamble and Constitution of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association,” Voice of Industry, Feb. 27, 1846.

  92 Voice of Industry, June 5, 1845.

  93 Ibid., Jan. 2, 1846, quoted in Eisler, Lowell Offering, pp. 39–40.

  94 Josephson, Golden Threads, p. 248.

  95 Voice of Industry, Jan. 2, 1846.

  96 Ibid., July 10, 1845.

  97 Lowell Advertiser, July 26, 1845, in Philip S. Foner, Factory Girls, p. 67.

  98 Voice of Industry, July 17, 1845.

  99 Eisler, Lowell Offering, p. 41.

  100 Robin K. Berson, Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 212.

  101 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 22.

  102 Berson, Marching to a Different Drummer, p. 215.

  103 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 14.

  104 Seth Luther, “Address Delivered Before the Mechanics and Workingmen of Brooklyn, (1836),” cited in Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, p. 198.

  105 Frederick Robinson quoted in Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, p. 195.

  106 Merle E. Curti, “Robert Rantoul, Jr., the Reformer in Politics,” New England Quarterly, vol. 5 (1932).

  107 Leonard W. Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 193; also see Robert Rantoul Jr., “Oration at Scituate, Massachusetts, 4 July, 1836,” quoted in Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, p. 197.

  108 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, pp. 12–13.

  109 Judge Thacher quoted in Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, p. 187.

  110 Elias Lieberman, Unions Before the Bar (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), pp. 21–22.

  111 Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, pp. 190–91.

  112 Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842) quoted in Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, p. 188.

  113 Lieberman, Unions Before the Bar, p. 26.

  114 Levy, Law of the Commonwealth, p. 183; Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, p. 209.

  115 Voice of Industry, Oct. 10, 1845.

  116 Ibid., Jan. 2, 1846.

  117 Dublin, Women at Work, p. 119.

  118 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 85.

  119 Voice of Industry, June 11 and 18, 1847.

  120 Miles, Lowell, As It Was, and As It Is, pp. 124–25.

  121 Massachusetts House Document No. 50, March 1845, in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, ed. John R. Commons, vol. 8 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1958), pp. 133–51.

  122 Operative, Dec. 28, 1844, in Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 115–16.

  123 Voice of Industry, March 13, 1846.

  124 Juravich, Hartford, and Green, Commonwealth of Toil, p. 26; Voice of Industry, June 12, 1845. Schouler several years later regained his seat in the legislature.

  125 Dulles, Labor in America, p. 86.

  126 Voice of Industry, March 13, 1846.

  127 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971; originally published 1898), p. 149.

  128 Only one signer of the resolution at Seneca Falls, factory worker Charlotte Woodward, lived long enough to cast a vote after women’s suffrage was granted seventy-two years later with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. See Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, “Seneca Falls Convention,” Encyclopedia of Women’s History in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2000), American Women’s History Online, Facts on File, Inc., http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?.

  129 Baxandall and Gordon, America’s Working Women, pp. 78–79.

  130 Seth Luther, a counterpart to Bagley as perhaps New England’s best-known labor orator and provocateur, had a far less happy end. He was drawn in 1842 to join and eventually help lead a suffrage crusade in his native Rhode Island, where a government charter dating from 1663 skewed voting in favor of rural owners of property and effectively disenfranchised the growing number of landless factory employees. A nascent People’s Party, formed to protest the restrictions, elected its own governor, Thomas Dorr, and proceeded even after its activities were declared illegal to claim election by votes the authorities technically ignored. Arrested and charged with treason, Luther made an eloquent defense in court, but it was not enough to escape a prison sentence. A most uncooperative convict, incarcerati
on left him broken in body and mind, and after a brief reimmersion in labor politics, he spent the rest of his life in various New England mental asylums. See Berson, Marching to a Different Drummer, pp. 216–17; see also Louis Hartz, “Seth Luther: The Story of a Working-Class Rebel,” New England Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3 (Sept. 1940); Marvin E. Gettleman, The Dorr Rebellion: A Study in American Radicalism, 1833–1849 (New York: Random House, 1973); and the UMass Library website subject “Dorr Rebellion,” http://library.uml.edu.

  131 Josephson, Golden Threads, p. 181.

  132 Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills,” p. 51; see also Eisler, Lowell Offering, p. 29.

  133 Ray Ginger, “Labor in a Massachusetts Cotton Mill, 1853–1860,” Business History Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (March 1954).

  CHAPTER TWO: HELL WITH THE LID OFF

  1 Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America: A History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 90.

  2 Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 77.

  3 Paul Faler, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, Shoemakers and Industrial Morality, 1826–1860,” Labor History, vol. 15 (Summer 1974). Faler uses the term “industrial morality” to describe “a tightening up of the moral code through either the abolition or drastic alteration of those customs, traditions, and practices that interfered with productive labor.”

  4 Faler, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution.”

  5 Dawley, Class and Community, p. 84.

  6 Bay State, April 12, 1860.

  7 Boston Transcript, Feb. 25, 1860.

  8 New York Times, Feb. 25, 1860.

  9 Bay State, March 1, 1860.

  10 Ibid., March 8, 1860.

  11 Tom Juravich, William F. Hartford, and James R. Green, Commonwealth of Toil: Chapters in the History of Massachusetts Workers and Their Unions (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 37.

  12 Bay State, March 22, 1860.

  13 Ibid., March 29, 1860.

  14 Draper, thirty years old, was, according to the New York Times, “a man of some little education, (who) has at times taught writing, bookkeeping, and, we believe, French.” Although not a shoemaker himself, he was the editor of a labor paper, the New England Mechanic. See New York Times, Feb. 25, 1860. The Lynn Daily Advertiser reported that Draper had “an indisposition to hard labor” and was a “dangerous influence” on the Lynn shoemakers. Reprinted in Boston Transcript, Feb. 24, 1860.