From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  Labor organizations were few and far between in colonial America and confined to men in skilled trades. Master craftsmen founded a handful of guilds. The largest, chartered in 1724, was the Carpenters’ Company of Philadelphia, which regulated the prices masters charged their customers, the wages they paid to journeymen, and their treatment of apprentices. But guilds had a minuscule impact on the helter-skelter American craft system, for they operated city by city in a tiny minority of trades. Local benevolent societies sprang up in a somewhat larger number of trades. Encompassing masters, journeymen and sometimes apprentices, these societies provided members with sick benefits, small loans, and assistance in times of dire need.

  Journeymen occasionally formed ad hoc organizations in order to make demands on employers, as when the Journeyman Caulkers of Boston suddenly appeared in 1741 to announce that its members would no longer work for promissory notes. More commonly, master craftsmen came together to stop production in protest of statutory caps on the prices they could charge. Masters of all crafts subject to price controls—carters, coopers, bakers, chimney sweepers, and others—took part in such actions. The courts routinely convicted them of conspiracy, and black craftsmen in particular risked more brutal retaliation. Rage sufficient to spawn violence permeated the South Carolina Gazette’s report in October 1763 that Charleston’s black chimney sweepers “had the insolence by a combination amongst themselves, to raise the usual prices, and to refuse doing their work, unless their exorbitant demands are complied with.”

  Among wage earners, sailors were by far the most militant. They included men of all colors and a few women who went to sea disguised as men. They displayed a legendary contempt for wielders of arbitrary authority, from constables to kings. Several thousand of them became pirates, whose declared purpose was to “plunder the rich.” And no one outshone sailors when it came to labor solidarity, for shipmates were quite literally all in the same boat. They often quit a ship en masse, refusing to leave port on vessels that were undermanned or in poor repair. They also staged numerous strikes, not only in port but also at sea. Safety was often the issue. In 1719, the crew of the Hanover Succession, sailing from Charleston to London, tired of pumping seawater out of the ship’s leaky hold and refused to work until the captain agreed to return to port. In other instances sailors struck to protest floggings, to stop captains from changing the itinerary once a ship was at sea, or to demand time off when they reached the next port. Work stoppages are called strikes on account of sailors; they would “strike”—that is, lower—a ship’s sails when they were no longer willing to work.

  On the eve of the American Revolution, the vast majority of people in the colonies that would form the United States lacked rights enjoyed by the colonial elite. Slaves, indentured servants, apprentices, women of all stations, free men without property: none had the right to vote and hold office. Together, they made up at least 90 percent of colonial society, and most of them were poor as well as politically disfranchised. Therein lay the heart of the “labor problem” from labor’s point of view. It was a problem shared by bound and free workers and one that both groups were determined to solve.

  * Mission industries expanded as time went on and grew especially large in California. By the early 1800s, the products included butter, tallow, hides and chamois leather, maize, wheat, wine, brandy, vegetable oils, and textiles.

  * An estimated 20,000 burials took place there.

  * Despite occasional unemployment, the city’s journeyman artisans earned slightly or substantially more than £60 a year depending on their crafts.

  * Its full name was Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

  On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, announcing to the world that thirteen North American colonies intended to throw off British rule and found a new nation based on republican government. Penned by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, this document was designed to stir souls:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  There, in plain language, was the spirit of the American Revolution.

  The Declaration’s signers came late to that spirit. American colonists had been at war with Britain since April 1775, when Massachusetts militiamen battled the British army; and the war followed more than a decade of anti-British protests by common people, especially artisans and wage workers in the coastal cities. Wealthy colonists had sometimes sponsored and supported these protests but had also viewed them with alarm. When they finally came around to the revolutionary program, they commandeered the movement.

  Jefferson was one of the wealthiest slaveholding planters in North America, and the Declaration’s other signers were well-to-do planters, lawyers, and merchants. They believed that the right to self-government belonged to people like themselves—white men of substantial means. But such men could not win a war or found a nation without rallying common people, whose quarrels with the British regime targeted privilege based on wealth and rank as well as royal prerogatives and imperial edicts. Thus the founding fathers signed on to a declaration that expressed a spirit much more egalitarian than their own.

  Nowhere was that spirit stronger and more unruly than among working people. Building on over a century of colonial labor rebellions, both the free and the unfree fought for “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” in many ways that the gentlemen of the Continental Congress did not appreciate. And these struggles grew all the more contentious after Britain’s defeat, when men of wealth constructed a republic that reneged on egalitarian ideals.

  FROM RESISTANCE TO INDEPENDENCE

  Britain’s empire in North America reached its zenith in 1763, when protracted wars with France and Spain ended in a treaty that brought all lands east of the Mississippi under British control. No one could have guessed that just twelve years later American colonies would take up arms against the mother country. But the seeds of that revolt had already been planted, for Britain’s imperial wars bankrupted its treasury. To meet the costs of empire, the British Parliament sought to squeeze more revenues from the colonies, touching off protests that led inexorably to revolution.

  The first round of protests took aim at the Stamp Act of 1765, which required that legal documents and other printed materials bear a stamp purchased from British agents. Marriage licenses, land deeds, indenture agreements, commercial contracts, playing cards, books and newspapers, handbill advertisements: all this and more were subject to the new tax. And to add insult to injury, revenues from the Stamp Act financed Britain’s colonial army and administrative apparatus—the very power structure that kept Americans under Parliament’s thumb.

  Anger at this arrangement sparked militant resistance, mainly among working people in coastal cities. Men from the maritime trades organized demonstrations that swelled with artisans, common laborers, housewives, and children, and sometimes targeted the property of British officials. In New York City, sailors and other maritime workers formed the anti-British Sons of Neptune and staged what observers called an “insurrection” against the Stamp Act. In Boston, the shoemaker Ebenezer MacIntosh led a crowd of 2,000 workingmen that demolished the local stamp agent’s office and vandalized his home.

  Some members of the wealthy and middle classes joined the movement against the Stamp Act. In Boston, Newport, New York, and other cities, protest committees cal
led the Sons of Liberty included merchants, lawyers, doctors, ministers, shopkeepers, and master craftsmen along with larger numbers of wage workers. Other gentlemen, fearful of British reprisals, supported protests behind the scenes. These were fragile alliances, however, for common people’s anger at Britain’s heavy hand routinely spilled over into anger at the rich. Less than two weeks after Boston workingmen attacked the stamp agent’s office and home, a second crowd ransacked the mansion of Massachusetts’s lieutenant governor. In Newport, workingman John Weber led Stamp Act protests whose participants said such radical things about redistributing wealth that the city’s merchants—who had hired Weber to organize the demonstrations—soon demanded his arrest.

  Assaults on the rich persisted even after Parliament caved in to American protests and repealed the Stamp Act in March 1766. That May, in New York City, a crowd turned out to jeer at the fancy attire and manners of people attending the opening of an expensive new theater. Before the night was out, the demonstrators had torn down the theater, then marched through town shouting “Liberty! Liberty!”

  With the Stamp Act gone, Parliament soon turned to a new plan for taxing the colonies. The Revenue Act of 1767 imposed tariffs known as the Townshend Duties on key goods Americans imported from abroad: paint, lead, glass, paper, and tea. Rebellious colonists responded with a “nonimportation” movement, a boycott of all British imports. A wide network of boycott committees—called Sons of Liberty, Regulators, Associators, or Liberty Boys—extended from Massachusetts to South Carolina and from major cities to the backwoods. Merchants and shopkeepers who sold British goods were denounced as public enemies and often tarred and feathered too.

  Women played crucial roles in the boycott by producing alternatives to British imports. They brewed herbal drinks and “Rye Coffee” as substitutes for tea; replaced paint with homemade whitewash; and virtually eliminated the colonies’dependence on British textiles by spinning gigantic volumes of cloth from wool, flax, and hemp. Hundreds of local women’s committees—often called the Daughters of Liberty—organized spinning bees and promoted slogans like, “Better to wear a Homespun Coat than to lose our Liberty.” In Kinderhook, New York, when a man scolded a spinning circle for meddling in politics, the women stripped off his clothes, covered him with molasses and flax down, and sent him on his way.

  As the boycott movement gained momentum, Britain enlarged its army in North America, stationing most of the reinforcements in New York City and Boston, the movement’s most militant centers. The soldiers liked to supplement their meager pay by moonlighting in waterfront jobs. Local workers competed for the same jobs, ever harder to find once the boycott curtailed commercial shipping. Tensions mounted, punctuated by occasional fistfights, until pitched battles erupted in 1770. In January, workers and soldiers in New York City slugged it out in a two-day street fight known as the Battle of Golden Hill. Push came to shove in Boston that March, when British troops brawled with rope makers who had insulted a soldier looking for work. Two days later, on the night of March 5, a crowd of workingmen taunted soldiers from the same regiment, who suddenly opened fire. Five workers were killed and another six wounded in what colonists called the Boston Massacre.

  The dead were seamen Crispus Attucks and James Caldwell, rope maker Samuel Gray, apprentice leather maker Patrick Carr, and apprentice ivory turner Sam Maverick. Attucks—a fugitive slave of mixed African and Indian ancestry, then a free mariner for 20 years—had been a member of the Sons of Liberty and a leader of the crowd. Ten thousand Bostonians marched in the martyrs’ funeral procession, and the dead were commemorated in many surrounding towns. Well into the nineteenth century, much of Massachusetts celebrated March 5th as the American Revolution’s premier holiday.

  On the very day of the Boston Massacre, well before the news reached London, Parliament rescinded the Townshend Duties except for the tax on tea. With that, the nonimportation coalition began to fragment. Merchants wished to resume the lucrative trade with Britain. Well-to-do families had tired of giving up imported luxuries. And as much as colonial elites might resent British rule, most distrusted the “mob” of common people who clung to a boycott abandoned by the upper classes.

  In fact, this so-called mob mounted well-organized resistance to the British. While the gentry vacillated, the movement spread. In New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina, master craftsmen and journeymen formed mechanics’ associations to press the boycott cause in colonial assemblies and councils. In November 1772, a Boston town meeting established a Committee of Correspondence to communicate with other cities and coordinate resistance. Within a few months identical committees had been authorized by town meetings and popular assemblies in every colony. The committees’ leaders typically came from the ranks of master craftsmen, professionals, or the handful of wealthy men still loyal to nonimportation, but small farmers, journeymen, and other wage workers made up most of the rank and file. One merchant complained that “the lowest Mechanicks discuss upon the most important points of Government with the utmost Freedom.”

  The committees carefully planned direct-action protests, breaking British laws in orderly ways. A prime example was the famous Boston Tea Party of December 1773, in which squads of men boarded British ships, dumped their cargo of tea into the harbor, and left without claiming any booty. That winter, similar “tea parties” took place in other ports, and though jobs were scarce, workingmen in Boston and New York City conformed to strict boycotts on labor for the British army. When General Thomas Gage called for workers to build military fortifications in Boston, no one from that city stepped forward, and later efforts to recruit New Yorkers failed as well. In the end Gage had to import carpenters and bricklayers from as far away as Nova Scotia.

  If organization and discipline strengthened the resistance movement, so did British reaction to the Boston Tea Party. To punish Massachusetts, Parliament passed a series of laws known in America as the Intolerable Acts. They closed Boston Harbor to all trade; forbade communities throughout the colony to hold more than one town meeting a year; allowed British officials indicted for crimes in Massachusetts to stand trial elsewhere; and empowered the British army to quarter troops in colonists’ homes. These statutes ignited resistance in every part of Massachusetts, whose citizens stockpiled weapons, formed local militias, and held town meetings in defiance of British orders. Expressions of sympathy poured forth from other colonies, and Committees of Correspondence grew in size and number as they collected food, clothing, and money for the blockaded Bostonians. The new forces included members of the wealthy classes, not only merchants but also Virginia’s big planters, who forged an anti-British alliance with that colony’s poor whites.

  For six weeks in fall 1774, representatives from every colony but Georgia gathered in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, which hammered out a common program for resistance. Though most of the delegates were men of wealth, the militant spirit of popular protests carried the day. The Congress launched a Continental Association, which decreed a total embargo on trade with Britain—no imports, no exports—and called for the formation of local committees to enforce the ban. By the end of the year embargo committees and anti-British militias had sprung up in all colonies, and the Association was forging them into a national movement.

  Outright war began on April 19, 1775, when Massachusetts militia companies fought the British troops General Gage had sent to seize a colonial arsenal in Concord. Within days, militiamen closed in on Boston, besieging Gage’s forces. In a matter of weeks, militia units from Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hamphire went to aid the siege, and another band of New Englanders routed British troops from Fort Ticonderoga in upper New York.

  In Philadelphia, the second Continental Congress laid plans to spread the fight. The delegates issued a formal declaration of war against Britain and authorized the creation of a Continental Army to be commanded by Virginia planter George Washington. But when they debated the question of American independence, caution
prevailed. Their declaration of war explicitly rejected independence, and another resolution implored Britain’s King George III to reconcile with the colonies.

  As the war wore on, however, popular anger at Britain reached new heights, and radical agitators channeled that anger into sentiment for independence. The most influential agitator was the journalist Thomas Paine, a former artisan whose plain language and democratic politics struck a deeply responsive chord among common people. In January 1776, Paine published a fifty-page pamphlet titled Common Sense that argued for an independent America under republican government. Readers snapped up more than 100,000 copies, and Common Sense was even more widely discussed—read aloud to people who were not literate enough to read it for themselves. Echoing Paine, the Declaration of Independence signaled the Continental Congress’s conversion to a program that the rank and file of revolutionaries had already embraced.

  Not all common people backed the cause. Contemporaries estimated that about one-third of free colonists favored independence, another third opposed it, and the rest stayed neutral. Only in New England and Virginia did the revolution have majority support. On the whole, it was more popular among the laboring and middle classes than among the elite, but local resentments sometimes produced countercurrents. In 1771, the North Carolina militia had crushed the Regulator Movement in which backcountry farmers rallied to stop judges and land speculators from confiscating the homesteads of tax delinquents. When the Regulators’ wealthy enemies later endorsed the revolution, much of the backcountry chose the other side. Revolutionary sentiment among large landowners had the same effect on many tenant farmers in New York’s Hudson Valley and poor whites in Eastern Shore Maryland.