Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T10:57:51.229Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Wage Labor, Bondage, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

David Montgomery
Affiliation:
Yale University

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Workers and Citizenship in Europe and North America
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Sullivan to Elbridge Gerry, May 6, 1776, quoted in Kerber, Linda K., “The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97 (04 1992):367.Google Scholar

2. Gunn, L.Ray, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, 1988), 9.Google Scholar

3. Tomlins, Christopher L., Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge, 1993), 3293;Google ScholarZuckerman, Michael, Peaceable Kingdoms; New England Towns in the 18th Century (New York, 1970);Google ScholarWilson, Joshua, “Electing ‘Suitabel Persons’: Authority. Politics, and Leadership in York, Maine, 1783–1820” (senior essay, Yale University, 1994). 621;Google ScholarSydnor, Charles G., American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia (New York, 1962), 7885.Google Scholar

4. Quoted in Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 132.Google Scholar

5. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Reeve, Henry (New York, 1838), 38;Google ScholarSwisher, Carl B., Roger B. Taney (New York, 1935), 4748.Google Scholar

6. Thatcher, Peter Oxenbridge, An Address to the Members of the Massachusetts Charitable Fire Society… May 31, 1805, quoted in Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 94.Google Scholar

7. Steinberg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill, 1989), 52.Google Scholar

8. Reeve, Tapping, The Law of Baron and Femme, of Parent and Child, Guardian and Ward, Master and Servant and of the Powers of the Courts of Chancery (Albany, N.Y., 1862), 482;Google ScholarKerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 119–27.Google Scholar

9. Stanley, Amy Dru, “Contract Rights in the Age of Emancipation: Wage Labor and Marriage After the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990), 283303;Google ScholarGrossberg, Michael, Governing the Hearth: Law and Family in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill, 1985);Google ScholarPackard, E. P. W., The Great Drama: or, the Millenial Harbinger, 4 vols. (Hartford, 18781879), I, 320;Google ScholarSapinsley, Barbara, The Private War of Mrs. Packard (New York, 1991);Google ScholarHimelhoch, Myra Samuels with Shaffer, Arthur H., “Elizabeth Packard: Nineteenth–Century Crusader for the Rights of Mental Patients,” Journal of American Studies 13 (1979):343–75.Google Scholar

10. Montgomery, David, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 1721.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 20–21;Google ScholarBonacich, Edna, “Asian Labor in the Development of California and Hawaii,” in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II, ed. Cheng, Lucy and Bonacich, Edna (Berkeley, 1984), 162–65.Google Scholar

12. Commons, John R. et al. , Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 10 vols. (Cleveland, 19101911) 3, 252, 257, 261, 278.Google Scholar

13. Slaves accounted for 23 percent of the nation's labor force over nine years of age in 1850 and 21 percent in 1860. Although the number of wage earners is difficult to calculate precisely from census data, the labor force in manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation, and domestic service accounted for 21 percent of the total in 1850 and 23 percent in 1860. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1975), I, 139.Google Scholar

14. Tomlins, , Law, Labor, and Ideology, 162, 198.Google Scholar

15. White, Shane, “‘It was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,” Journal of American History 81 (06 1994):1350;Google ScholarRoediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991);Google ScholarSaxton, Alexander, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (London, 1990);Google ScholarBaker, Jean H., Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid–Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983);Google ScholarDavis, Susan G.,Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth–Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1986), 46;Google ScholarGilje, Paul A., Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, 1987), 153–58, 162–70;Google ScholarWebb, Frank J., The Garies and Their Friends (London, 1857).Google Scholar

16. Geary, Dick, European Labor Protest, 1848–1939 (London, 1981), 5965, 103–18;Google ScholarBlackburn, David and Eley, Geoff, Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth–Century Germany (New York, 1984), 256–57, 275;Google ScholarEley, Geoff, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, 1980), 2124;Google Scholarvan der Linden, Marcel and Rojahn, Jurgen, eds., The Formation of Labour Movements, 1870–1914 (Leiden, 1990);Google ScholarTherborn, Göran, “The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy,” New Left Review 103 (0506 1977): 1117;Google ScholarVandervelde, Emile, Socialism versus the State, trans. Kerr, Charles H. (Chicago, 1919), 61. Vandervelde wrote this important book in 1914.Google Scholar

17. Julian, George W., Political Recollections (Chicago, 1884), 16.Google Scholar

18. Davis, , Parades and Power, 47, 149, 157;Google ScholarMcGerr, Michael E., The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York, 1986);Google ScholarBaker, , Affairs of Party, 71107.Google Scholar See also. Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (06 1984): 620–47;Google ScholarBlewett, Mary H., Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana, 1988), 130–62.Google Scholar

19. Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983);Google ScholarHolli, Melvin G., Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics (New York, 1969).Google Scholar See also Lipin, Lawrence M., Producers, Proletarians, and Politicians: Workers and Party Politics in Evansville and New Albany, Indiana, 1850–87 (Urbana, 1994);Google ScholarOestreicher, Richard J., Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana, 1986);Google ScholarSchneirov, Richard, “The Knights of Labor in the Chicago Labor Movement and Municipal Politics, 1877–1887” (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1984).Google Scholar

20. Speck, Peter A., The Singletax and the Labor Movement (Madison, 1917), 68.Google Scholar

21. Scobey, David, “Boycotting the Politics Factory: Labor Radicalism and the New York City Mayoral Election of 1884 [sic.],” Radical History Review 2830 (1984):280325 (quotation 311);Google ScholarSpeek, , Singletax and the Labor Movement, 101–04;Google ScholarPost, Louis F., The Prophet of San Francisco: Personal Memories and Interpretations of Henry George (New York, 1930), 73, 76, 78, 86.Google Scholar

22. Saville, Julie, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, 1994), 143–88;Google ScholarFitzgerald, Michael W., “To Give Our Votes to the Party': Black Political Agitation and Agricultural Change in Alabama, 1865–1870,” Journal of American History 76 (09 1989):489505;Google ScholarJaynes, Gerald D., Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South (New York, 1986), 4553.Google Scholar For a wartime offer of one—quarter of the crop, see Berlin, Ira et al. , Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 (Cambridge, 1982-), vol. 2, 327.Google Scholar

23. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 283–91;Google ScholarRachleff, Peter J., Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia, 1984), 3951;Google ScholarFitzgerald, , “‘To Give Our Votes to the Party,’” 495–505.Google Scholar

24. Simkins, Francis B. and Woody, Robert H., South Carolina during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1932), 184;Google ScholarNorrell, Robert J., Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York, 1985), 311.Google Scholar

25. [Albion, Tourgee], A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools (New York, 1880), 342.Google Scholar

26. Kousser, J. Morgan, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the One–Party South (New Haven, 1974), 26, 41, 93;Google ScholarMoore, James Tice, Two Paths to the New South: The Virginia Debt Controversy, 1870–1883 (Lexington, Ky., 1974), 104, 116;Google ScholarJackson, Luther P., Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1865–1895 (Norfolk, Va., 1945), 7981.Google Scholar

27. Rush, to John Adams, July 21, 1789, quoted in Kerber, Women of the Republic, 218.Google Scholar

28. Matthews, Albert, “Hired Man and Help,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 5 (Transactions, 1897, 1898), 234;Google ScholarMorris, Richard B., Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946), 118.Google Scholar

29. Hay, Douglas and Craven, Paul, “Master and Servant in England and the Empire: A Comparative Study,” Labour/Le Travail 31 (Spring 1993): 176;Google ScholarSimon, Daphne, “Master and Servant,” in Democracy and the Labor Movement, ed Saville, John (London, 1954), 160200. The statistics on prosecutions are on 160.Google Scholar

30. Montgomery, , Citizen Worker, 31–39; New Albany, Indiana, Ledger–Standard, July 10, 1873, cited in Lipin, Producers, Proletarians, and Politicians, 215.Google Scholar

31. Stark v. Parker, 19 Mass. (2 Pick.) 267; Payne v. The Western Atlantic Railroad Company, 81 Tenn. 507;Google ScholarForbath, William E., Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 185.Google Scholar

32. McCarthy v. Mayor, Aldermen and Commonality of the City of New York, 96 N.Y. 1, 7 (1884), quoted in Stanley, “Contract Rights,” 62.Google Scholar

33. On company rules and union rules, see Montgomery, David, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987), 944, 148–70, 203–13.Google ScholarOn imprisonment of union delegates who fined employers for violating union rules, see New York v. Hughes, 137 NY 29 (1893), and the discussion of plumbers' union fines in John Swinton's Paper, August 22, 1886. Conseils de prud'hommes in France did give legal sanction to customs of the trade which ran counter to employers' rules.Google ScholarCotereau, Alain, “Justice et injustice ordinaire sur les lieux de travail d'après les audiences prud'homales (1806–1866),” Le Mouvement Social 141 (1011 1987): 2560.Google Scholar

34. The full scope of union lobbying has yet to be examined by historians, and Victoria Hattam's categorical distinction between the lobbying objectives of the Knights and that of the unions is misleading.Hattam, , Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton, 1993).Google ScholarFor a partial list of union—supported legislative demands, see “Michael McKettrick,” Labor Leader, October 24, 1891; Knights of Labor, Proceedings of D.A. 16 held at Scranton, July 28th and 29th 1890 (manuscript, no pagination, Powderly Papers, reel 66).Google Scholar On arbitration laws, see Friedman, Gerald, “Worker Militancy and Its Consequences: Political Responses to Labor Unrest in the United States, 1877–1914,” International Labor and Working–Class History 40 (Fall 1991): 89.Google Scholar On nineteenth—century protective legislation for women, see Kessler—Harris, Alice, Out to Work; A History of Wage—Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), 180–94;Google ScholarSklar, Kathryn Kish, Florence Kelley and Women's Political Culture, vol. 1, Doing the Nation's Work, 1830–1900 (New Haven, 1995), 171285.Google Scholar

35. Forbath, , Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement 38n, 177–87; Stanley, “Contract Rights,” 283–303. Quotation on 302.Google Scholar

36. Ware, Norman J., The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895 (New York, 1929), 334–45;Google ScholarGrimes, Mary C., The Knights in Fiction: Two Labor Novels of the 1880s (Urbana, 1986), 44;Google ScholarCrump v. Commonwealth, 84 Va. 927, 946 (1888), quoted in Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, 84.Google Scholar

37. Ringenbach, Paul T., Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery of Unemployment in New York (Westport, Conn., 1973), 2023;Google ScholarStanley, Amy Dru, “Beggars Can't Be Choosers”: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America,” Journal of American History 78 (03 1992): 1277.Google Scholar

38. Harring, Sidney L., “Class Conflict and the Suppression of Tramps in Buffalo, 1892–1894,” Law and Society Review 11 (Summer 1977): 873911. The New York statute is quoted on 881; Ringenbach, Tramps and Reformers, 22–23.Google Scholar

39. New York Gewerkschafts—Zeitung, April 15, 1879;Google ScholarKaufman, Stuart B., ed., The Samuel Gompers Papers, 4 vols. (Urbana, 19861991), vol. I, 342;Google ScholarLipin, , Producers, Proletarians, and Politicians, 151;Google ScholarClosson, Carlos C. Jr., “The Unemployed in American Cities”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 8 (01, 1894): 168217, 257–58;Google ScholarKeyssar, Alexander, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1986), 349;Google Scholar“Tramp Circular” in Goodwyn, Lawrence, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976), 597–99, quotation 598.Google Scholar

40. Bishop, Joel, New Commentaries on the Criminal Law, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1892), vol. I, 273–74.Google Scholar

41. Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986), 32.Google Scholar

42. Cooper, , Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy (Columbia, S.C., 1826), 260,Google Scholar quoted in Harris, David, Socialist Orgins in the United States: American Forerunners of Marx, 1817–1842 (Assen, Netherlands, 1966), 26n;Google ScholarStansell, , City of Women, 33–35, quotation 35.Google Scholar

43. Stansell, , City of Women, 35;Google ScholarNash, Gary B., The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revoultion (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 130;Google ScholarHartog, Hendrick, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1983), 140–42, 151–52;Google ScholarGilje, , Road to Mobocracy, 228–30.Google Scholar

44. Journal of Commerce, February 1, 14, 18, 1837; Evening Star, February 15, 1837.Google Scholar I am indebted to Elizabeth Basch for the references. Cf. the degnified depiction of the protests in Byrdsall, Fitzwilliam, The History of the Loco–Foco or Equal Rights Party (New York, 1842), 99113.Google Scholar

45. Ringenbach, , Tramps and Reformers, 15;Google ScholarChicago Tribune, January 2, 1874, quoted in Sawislak, Karen Lynn, “Smoldering City: Class, Ethnicity, and Politics in Chicago at the Time of the Great Fire, 1867–1871” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990), 313.Google Scholar

46. von Waltershausen, August Sartorius, “Das Hilfskassenwesen in Nordamerika,” Jahrbucher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Neue Folge, Bd. 10 (1885), 112–14;Google ScholarWestern Odd Fellows Magazine 3 (July 1854): 6, quoted in Lipin, Producers, Proletarians, and Politicians, 37.Google Scholar

47. Die Gewerkschafts–Zeitung, March 15, 1880. My translation of the text: “[Die Unterstützungskassen … erwecken das Interesse] selbst das unserer Frauen, die sonst gewöhnlich, weil weniger idealistisch und mehr egoistisch wie der Mann, die Theilnahme an Vereinigungen, die keine materiellen Vortheile bieten, als unnütz und als Zeit– und GeldVerschwendung betrachten.”Google Scholar

48. Mayor's Address, City Year Book for New Haven, 1877, (New Haven, 1878), 23.Google Scholar

49. Ringenbach, , Tramps and Reformers, 83, 93–97.Google Scholar

50. Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944), 3;Google ScholarLippmann, Walter, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York, 1914).Google Scholar