Advocating The Man
Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840
by Joshua R. Greenberg

Organization

Chapter Five — Trade Unions

1

In the spring of 1819, the Journeymen Masons' Society met to discuss a plan by their bosses to lower wages. The organization declared that if the reduction went ahead, "it would be impossible for many to support themselves and [their] families."1 The men agreed not to work under the new rate structure. A few days later, the Society drafted an open letter to the public explaining their situation. Due to the fact that they only worked an average of 213 days a year, a 15 shilling workday paid an annual salary of only $399.37 1/2.2 The masons sought more work, "Sundays excepted," but could not find extra employment. They concluded by asking, "how it is possible for a journeyman who has a family of five persons, and numbers have more, to support them as they should be," given that the $368 cost of food, rent, fuel, and clothing left them with only about $30 for education, doctor's bills, and other emergency family expenses?3

Ten years earlier, Robert Townsend Jr. and the Journeymen House Carpenters Union penned a similar public appeal. The carpenters' budget noted an annual income of $400, with $327.50 going to food, rent, fuel, and clothing and $30 for work-related expenses. A balance of only $42.50 remained for "wife's clothing, expenses of family, sickness, and the clothing and education of children" along with the difficult decision for "fathers of families to judge what will be the amount of the surplus for the maintenance of old age."4

Both the Masons' Society and Journeymen House Carpenters employed public rhetoric which explicitly grounded their workplace demands in their desire to champion family breadwinning and family leisure time obligations. The fact that organized working men overwhelmingly self-identified as household providers meant that such rhetoric should not be viewed as empty sentimentalism, but rather as central to their attempt to fulfill domestic identity.

While Section Two probed a variety of economic institutions and other workers that organized men perceived as threats to their household-based masculine responsibilities, this chapter begins Section Three by examining the way that working men responded to such potential threats by collectively organizing into trade unions in order to protect their position as breadwinners. Working men's multi-layered breadwinner ideology included the obligation to care for their household dependents materially and mentally. This meant that journeymen both needed to earn enough money in the workplace to support their families' domestic needs and to secure enough time outside the workplace to properly oversee and govern their families' progress.5 While individual men felt the pressure of upholding their household-based masculine responsibilities, they found it almost impossible to address these issues on their own, so they sought collective action—in the form of trade unions—to assist them in providing for and maintaining their domestic role. As the actions of the Masons' and the House Carpenters' Societies demonstrate, organized men defended their decisions to stand out from work by informing the public of their breadwinning responsibilities and the actual monetary difficulties they faced. Significantly, their household budgets included both family obligations to be satisfied by pecuniary means (rent, provisions, etc.) and family obligations to be satisfied by temporal means (retirement, not working on Sunday, etc.).

5

This chapter analyzes organized New York working men's breadwinner ideology and demonstrates how breadwinning concerns grounded trade union rhetoric in a number of discursive arenas during the early nineteenth-century labor movement. Because this ideology developed within a milieu where women's work was either unpaid or underpaid because of the assumption of women's performance of domestic labor, scholars writing on the creation of early republican breadwinning have been eager to determine breadwinner ideology's effect on single working women and the wives of working men. So, much of this discussion has focused on how men used new industrial conditions to limit opportunities for women or on female attempts to resist or break apart the artificial classifications between the worlds of breadwinner (paid) and dependent (unpaid) labor.6 While organized men did occasionally use this rhetoric to argue against perceived threats from female workers, these examples pale in comparison to the way trade unions utilized breadwinning discourse to protect and maintain conceptions of ideal household-based masculinity.

First, the chapter shows how public trade union rhetoric consistently explained how skilled working men used monetary gains to first and foremost provide for family obligations and household maintenance. Second, it highlights how organized men's responses to perceived threats to their domestic role was not just public posturing by examining the internal trade union discussions and debates saturated by a preoccupation with forming contingency plans for family support. Finally, this discussion analyzes breadwinning ideology and rhetoric in terms of unionist attempts to obtain more leisure time away from the workplace. This leisure time, whether in the evenings or on Sunday, contributed to their ability to oversee their families and govern their households. This chapter argues that organized men created and maintained trade unions grounded in the protection of breadwinning responsibilities as part of the response to a series of perceived threats to their household-based masculinity. Breadwinning should be recognized as one of the central tenets of early trade unionism, and not merely a sideline issue.7

Breadwinning

Skilled male workers developed their breadwinner ideology as part of the process that broke down and changed artisanal production in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the traditional artisan household, workplace and home united under one roof with one male head, signifying his economic independence in regard to his family and other dependents. Journeymen in this system lived and worked in the master's household until they could accumulate enough capital and tools to marry and set up independent household workshops of their own.8

As this routine changed and fewer journeymen artisans could afford to become masters, a proliferation of married journeymen-for-life sought a new way to establish themselves as economically independent.9 In this new economic arrangement, male workers championed economic independence solely through breadwinning and household authority—albeit connecting outside-the-home work experiences with domestic obligations—rather than traditional practices which consolidated workplace and household mastery.10 This gradual process varied in speed and scope depending on the nature of individual crafts, but in New York City, it generally concluded by the first half of the nineteenth century.11 An 1836 report to the National Trades' Union even concluded that a "workman" was "the parent, the husband, or the brother," whose support kept "his wife or relative at home, to perform the duties of the household."12 As a new model of household-based worker masculinity emerged between 1800 and 1840, breadwinning ideology gained prominence.

Given the connections between domestic and workplace arenas, organized working men wore the breadwinner badge proudly alongside other work-related duties. This was certainly evident in the challenge made by the Journeymen Cordwainers' Union to their bosses during their 1809 labor conspiracy trial. William Sampson, their radical Irish defense lawyer, invited master cordwainer plaintiffs to imagine themselves in the shoes of a typical journeyman. He asked them to "take his station in the garret or cellar of one of these industrious men, get a leather apron and a strap, a last, a lap-stone and a hammer, and peg and stitch from five in the morning till eight in the evening, and feed and educate his family with what he earns."13

10

This picture of a typical journeyman cordwainer's existence clearly demonstrated the importance of breadwinner ideology to trade union rhetoric. For the cordwainer, a family to feed and educate in the domestic realm was as vital a component of the performance of his manly workplace duties as a hammer and a leather apron.14 There was no perceived separation between his duties stitching leather and his duties feeding and educating his family. So, even though market developments physically divorced the home and work spheres for journeymen, the interconnectedness of domestic and workplace obligations kept the spheres united.15 Upholding both of these responsibilities allowed journeymen who could not become economically independent masters in the workplace to fashion a new version of economic independence in the home as a breadwinner.

While this ideology limited women's public economic role, artisans' wives almost universally supported the notion that husbands publicly engaged the economy on behalf of the household.16 Martha May effectively argues that during the nineteenth century, artisans' wives predominantly buttressed the trade union assertion that husbands were the family's primary providers.17 So, no matter how much money women contributed to the family budget, men always claimed the right of first refusal on the independent breadwinner label because they considered the amount of the financial contribution less important than the type of financial contribution. The story of Elizabeth Kline, mentioned in Chapter One, is telling in this respect. Even in a public document asking the Common Council to allow her to act as a financial agent by selling coffee during her husband's period of unemployment, Kline defended her husband's right and duty to perform as the family breadwinner.

The reality of multiple family providers (rather than a single paternal provider) did not foster support for a more diverse earning class among artisans; instead, it redoubled journeymen efforts to obtain a breadwinner wage. Prescriptive literature detailing the benefits of breadwinning husbands and domesticated wives crowded pro-labor newspapers. An article entitled "For the Ladies" listed ten rules for an artisan's wife's proper behavior. One of the rules reminded women to "occupy yourself only with household affairs; wait till your husband confides to you those [affairs] of a high importance; and do not give your advice till he asks it."18 A separate piece entitled, "A Good Wife," contained a series of riddles, including the reminder that a woman should be like a snail, keeping "within her own doors," but not a snail, "carrying all she is worth on her back."19 The placement of these articles within the pages of the National Trades' Union, a news organ for the city's umbrella labor organization, the General Trades' Union (GTU), both reinforced union members' ideas about what behavior they should expect from their own wives and reminded female readers what behavior men expected of them in a pro-union household.20

New conceptions of the relationship between domestic masculinity and the workplace did not, however, automatically result in rosier economic prospects for journeymen. Skilled craftsmen and their families usually lived outside the realm of extreme poverty, but they could not hope for much in the way of savings or luxuries. One reason for their predicament was that the economic advancements of the market revolution did nothing to resolve the high inflation for household expenses. This period saw the construction of the Erie Canal and other transportation improvements that allowed merchants and manufacturers limitless business opportunities, but drove down wage rates.21 Expenses for a journeyman's family of five or six often surpassed the income he could generate in the boom-and-bust cycle of craft production. While married journeymen managed to persevere when the economy flourished, financial downturns spelled unemployment and disaster.

Artisans Dressed For Work A political cartoon entitled Sober Second Thoughts, sketched during the Panic of 1837, illustrates this situation. Along with a group of dispirited working men, a metalsmith, third from the right in a top hat, noted that "I have for many years been steadily employed at $2 per day, until recently, and now am told by my Employer that he has nothing to do & I am discharged; and how I am to get bread for my family I do not know."22 The simple sentiment expressed here hit home, literally, for journeymen: mind your economic decisions during prosperous times, because circumstances can change quickly and your family will still need your support. One popular contemporary treatise on household economy lamented that a "married man has no right to expect the same plenty of food and of raiment that the single man has."23 At moments of crisis, trade union rhetoric specifically addressed breadwinning ideology and its importance to organized men's economic position.

15

While the early-nineteenth century trade union movement in New York grew out of an attempt to collectively address breadwinning demands, individual union members navigated a fine line between organizing to fulfill their families' needs and putting themselves at economic risk. Trade union records reveal some of this tension, showing that members sometimes struck in the name of breadwinning ideology and at other times missed a union meeting or even stepped down from the organization entirely in the name of upholding family responsibilities. When the Typographical Society amended its by-laws in 1811, it included an article asking members to attend meetings only, "when in your power so to do, provided it be not detrimental to yourself or family."24 This would not seem so extraordinary if the printers or other journeymen expected a strong showing at their weekly or monthly union meetings, but the Society's membership in these years was inconsistent at best.25 Judging by participation at Society of Journeymen Shipwrights and Caulkers meetings, quorum was never a sure bet in the 1810s. From June 1815 to June 1817 attendance at monthly meetings varied between 20 and 161 individuals.26

Family sacrifices (even at the expense of a union working to help provide for that family) were just as common a generation later when H. D. Bristol, the acting President of the Typographical Society, resigned his position in a letter sent from upstate. Bristol wrote that he needed to step down because "circumstances of domestic and pecuniary affairs" prevented him from doing his job.27 Although Bristol's activities in the Society began many years earlier and he rose to its highest office, he chose to leave the organization rather than abandon his household obligations.

Such examples show that even among trade union members, support for breadwinning ideology could be demonstrated in a variety of ways. It is therefore important to remember that a simple, causal link did not exist between labor organizations and breadwinning ideology, but rather the relationship was part of a series of connections between household-based masculinity and the workplace. In order to see what such connections meant on the ground level of labor organizing, it is useful to look at the Journeymen Cabinet Makers' Union's 1835 strike.

Tailors' Price List, 1805 Like carpenter and printer employers, master cabinet makers paid workers by the job, utilizing a "book of prices" to set task rates. Given the variety of tasks certain craftsmen performed, such books could be extensive and therefore slow to change. The House Carpenters' 1802 book of prices, for example, contained over seventy pages of prices for items such as doors, window frames, and joints.28 While not all individual workers strictly followed the price books, their role in the 1835 Cabinet Makers' strike is telling. The journeymen, through GTU coordination, turned out from work following an argument with their bosses over the establishment of a new book of prices. Before the strike began, Barnabas S. Gillespie, the union's delegate to the GTU Convention reported that the cabinet makers wished to "establish their new Book of Prices, the old Book, adopted in 1810, having been found deficient in various particulars. The new Book, he stated, was calculated to obviate all the difficulties growing out of the old Book."29 The adherence to a 25-year-old price list meant that 1830s cabinet makers worked within the same price structure as artisans from a generation earlier. Likewise, any new work that they had adopted in the intervening years would not have established rates. While their prices remained stagnant, their costs and living expenses had not.30 Beef prices fluctuated between nine dollars and fourteen dollars per barrel in the years preceding the cabinet makers' strike and rent prices more then doubled in the decades since 1810.31 It should also be noted that GTU minutes show a note of thanks from the Cabinet Makers' Union to the House Carpenters' Union, Ship Joiners' Union, and Piano-forte Makers' Union for strike solidarity and support; all three trades utilized price books.32

Other workers more explicitly cited the lack of wages appropriate for breadwinning and high expenses as the most pressing reasons for striking in these years. Only a month after the Cabinet Makers' Union strike, the Cordwainers' Society "concluded upon a strike for an advance of wages—considering the present prices inadequate to support their families, owing to the continued increase of expenses they are subject to."33 Such episodes multiplied because, as one contemporary writer noticed, "house-rent and the price of fuel have equally increased: so that it is next to impossible for a man, on a moderate income, to support a wife and children."34

20

This difficult situation was hardly new during the mass-unionization days of the 1830s. One journeyman shoemaker wrote to the public during the winter of 1815 that journeymen chose to act because some employers "reduced their men's wages, on some articles, lower than it was seven years ago."35 Scores of similar notices appeared in New York's newspapers between 1800 and 1840 as trade unionists cited the "duty they owe themselves, their families and posterity," in almost every conflict with master craftsmen which involved maintaining or raising wage rates.36 Sometimes artisans took their plight to an even grander stage, sending dozens of petitions for aid to Congress in Washington. One typical petition written during the Panic of 1819 noted that "a great portion of our mechanics and artists are unemployed" and were left without any "means to support their families."37

Since some contemporary middle-class men and even journeymen's own bosses produced similar rhetoric about their duty to provide for their wives and children; it can be argued that organized men did not uniquely employ the rhetoric of breadwinning ideology. However, while the rhetoric of supporting one's family seemed universal, the context differed between the groups and meant very different things to each collection of men. The same words did not carry the same meaning when mustered by employees and employers, who thought very differently about what constituted fair pay for work performed in the name of breadwinning. It is useful to cite, at length, an 1836 dialogue between a master builder and a journeyman bricklayer named John reprinted in The Democrat, a pro-labor newspaper:

Builder—Good morning John, I want you to go to work for me, and to remain in my employ all summer.
John—How much do you calculate to give your men this summer?
B.—Fourteen shillings, I think that is a very good price, and ought to satisfy you.
J.—I do not consider it a good price at no time, more especially now, when every thing is so high.—How do you think a man with a wife and six children can live on 14s. at the present rate of rents, fuel, provisions, &c.?
B.—I am aware that a family cannot have many of the luxuries of life on that income, but that is more than you have sometimes had, and many support families on much less than that.
J.—To my sorrow and regret I know too well, that myself and too many more, have spun out a miserable existence for want of compensation. To support a family of eight persons with any thing like comfort on 14s. is entirely out of the question. Mechanics and laborers know little or nothing about comfort, so far as their physical wants are concerned. You bosses who live in good, if not splendid houses,—[dine on] beef, turkies [sic], celery, and all the delicacies of the market; have no conception how the men in your employ live, exist I ought to say—live they do not comfortably.
B.—I am sensible that a man cannot fare sumptuously every day on 14s. but it is as much as we can afford to give. We have taken contracts at very low rates, materials of all kinds have risen very much and if we do not get the labour done at a low rate we will lose money …
J.—I shall not work for 14s. at present, I cannot afford it, it would not be doing justice to my family. The working mechanics have suffered privations and degradation too long, and they are now determined to make a bold and manly effort to better the condition of themselves and their families. I cannot see any good reason why, the men who do all the labor should not live as well at least as those who do not labor.
B.—You know John, that mechanics and laborers have always been considered an inferior class of society, and it always will be so, it never was intended that there should be an equality in condition.38

While probably a bit overstated, the dialogue between John and the master builder demonstrated how differently each interpreted a breadwinner's needs and domestic responsibilities. John clearly expressed that he could not pay for his family's expenses in the summer of 1836 on only 14 shillings ($1.75) a day. John's intention to not work in the name of upholding his domestic responsibilities spoke to a definition of breadwinning that differed significantly from his employers. Organized working men's breadwinning ideology did not try and emulate middle-class respectability; it tried to keep pace with journeymen's lived experiences and the demographic realities of their households. Given that the article in The Democrat ran only a few months after the Great Fire of December 1835, which made rents rise 100% and sometimes 200%, it seems likely that John's point about current high prices was well founded.39 The master builder assumed that some money was better than no money, even if it only afforded John and his family an uncomfortable lifestyle inferior to his own.

However, for most workers, this was not a solution. Just a few months later, labor leader Seth Luther summed up the problem during a speech in Brooklyn, noticing that "those who build houses in these days have none of their own."40 Skilled workers such as John did not claim to want their bosses' wealth or luxuries, only to support their families in a modest comfort. Journeymen at the time referred to this outlook as breadwinning "competency."41 The idea, expressed by the master builder in the dialogue, that some men deserved a better version of competency than others contributed to journeymen's wage stagnation even as living expenses rose. In order to expose this double-standard and obtain real breadwinning wages which kept pace with inflationary household expenses John, like the House Carpenters' Union cited above, utilized tangible family budgets in their strike appeals, to appeal to the public's sense of fair treatment.

Dealing With Illness, Accidents, and Death

While public trade union rhetoric appealed for higher (or at least not diminished) wages on the basis that workers spent the money on their dependents, internal union discussions concentrated on how to maintain family support if the breadwinner was sick, injured, dead, or out of work due to a labor stoppage. In union meeting minutes, union constitutions, and speeches at union events, organized men appeared preoccupied with composing and enforcing rules that enabled members to receive benefits during these moments of crisis. Numerous examples show that rather than being relegated to sympathetic rhetoric that appealed to the public during potentially unpopular labor actions, breadwinner ideology inundated private conversations within the early trade union movement. Because of its importance, breadwinning became the central point of internal debate and conflict among unionists themselves as they asked themselves: "Shall we then fail our homes to provide?"42

25

When illness struck a journeyman craftsman, his body could fail, but more importantly his ability to provide for his family failed. Preventive medicine was not much of an option for working men and whether it was a minor flu or a periodic cholera outbreak, some illness eventually caught up with them.43 In a speech to the Typographical Society, Thomas Ringwood simply stated that "to-day we may be blessed with the enjoyment of perfect health, tomorrow we may be laid on the bed of sickness."44 As a means of dealing with the danger, the Society even took an 1816 subscription for its members to the City Dispensary.45 Workers' poor health record provoked the Journal of Health, Conducted by an Association of Physicians to recommend increased use of "public gymnasia and public baths" to keep their bodies clean and disease-free.46 With constant reminders of the obstacles that sickness presented, organized men often discussed their own health and the necessity of acting to avoid the ravages of disease. The 1819 Journeymen Masons' strike budget set aside some of their scanty earnings for "doctor's bills"; however, the more important issue of how to provide for one's family after a breadwinner became sick inevitably dominated conversation.47

Organized men looked to their fellow unionists for financial and moral support during periods of illness. Internal discussions from a number of different trade unions cite the distribution of sick payments as one of the primary benefits of union membership. Through such dispensations, early craft unions functioned as mutual benefit societies at the same time they enforced price lists and struck for higher wages. Organized men took such benefits seriously and many individuals probably joined trade unions just to ensure some form of family health insurance.

In these years, craft-based benefit societies offered one of the only means for a sick journeyman to replace money lost due to poor health. When a union member took ill, the society sent a committee to verify the condition of the member and determine his family's economic need.48 If the household demonstrated need, the committee decided on a plan of action. In the August 1816 case of sick printer Peter Riley, the Visiting Committee reported to the Typographical Society meeting that Riley, "a member, was sick - [and] the sum of three dollars was awarded him, and a draft was made upon the Treasurer."49 The three dollar award accounted for only a few days' wages, but in Riley's case this allowed his family to buy a week's worth of food. For a sick union member, the acceptance of financial backing at a time when circumstances out of his control threatened his role as the independent head of the household allowed him the opportunity to reestablish his breadwinning position later. Healthy organized men likewise buttressed their own breadwinner ideology by supporting fellow union members in order to reinforce the notion that journeymen could support their own families without charity or degrading their craft position.

Union members proudly boasted of their breadwinning abilities by providing sick benefits for one another. In speech after speech, they reminded one another how many men they aided and what a boon the benefits offered to the sick men and their families. Edward S. Bellamy thanked his fellow printers in an 1821 Fourth of July oration praising their noble effort over the previous decade. He bragged that "the expenditures for the last six months, (principally for the purpose of relieving the sick,) amount to one hundred and five dollars."50 The number of those helped and the amount dispersed was less important than how the benefits helped needy families. George Asbridge, in a speech to the Typographical Society, spoke emotionally about the peace of mind that union sick payments brought to an injured or ill member:

When the infirm parent can comfort himself with the reflection that his family is provided for, that his little suppliant infants need not ask in vain for food, nor wring the desponding tear from a father's eye—the hapless messenger of a woeful errand, he enjoys his quiet slumbers without interruption, and no rude care break in to disturb his waking fruition. He contemplates his little family with delight, and when again restored to health; when his slackened nerves resume their wonted vigor, he cheerfully plies himself to his useful labours, in behalf of those who look up to him for protection and support.51

The address cited the understanding that journeymen self-identified as parents whose primary responsibility was to labor in order to feed and comfort their family. Asbridge built on this portrait to directly relate the ability of a sick journeyman to recover from illness and resume his household-based masculine duties as family provider to payouts from the Typographical Society. In this capacity, the union not only rhetorically urged its members to fulfill their breadwinning ideals, but also acted monetarily to facilitate the process.

30

Besides worrying about contracting a variety of debilitating diseases, journeyman artisans dreaded the numerous accidents that could disable them, making breadwinning impossible. Nineteenth-century craft work proved notoriously dangerous for working men. Newspapers frequently reported job-related injuries or deaths and union speeches celebrated the unemployment relief provided to fellow members who suffered from "unforeseen and unavoidable misfortunes."52 The 1831 Typographical Society Constitution even enumerated some of the dangers that printers encountered in workshops that were "illy calculated to afford a good circulation of air, or what is next in importance, good light . . . [and] to be thus confined for such a length of time, inhaling the stagnant air of a printing office, is sufficient to enervate a man of the most vigorous constitution."53 Doctor John Griscom similarly noted in his treatise on The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Class of New York that a full "inquiry into the amount of air allowed" to "laborers in work-shops, will exhibit a degree of neglect, or ignorance, in relation to this vitally important subject."54

Dangers lurked around every corner in such working conditions and minor injuries abounded. Even so, most craftsmen simply tried to work through the pain. John Parks, a young immigrant carpenter, wrote to his father of his generally good health, "except one of my thumbs and one finger, which is so bad that I cannot hold my pen; it is with difficulty that I can write."55 It was this type of hardship the Journeymen House Carpenters' Union hoped to avoid, stating in their 1833 Constitution that the organization had formed, "to raise a fund for the relief of such of its Members as shall suffer by accidents while engaged in their mechanical occupations."56 Such concerns could even apply to an artisan's tools, which acted as an extension of his body. Noting craftsmen's dependence on their trade implements for breadwinning, these same carpenters also hoped to offer help for members "as shall have lost their tools by fire."57

It was not just an injury or accident on the job that could threaten a workers' breadwinning ability, it was the everyday grind of harsh, manual labor which eventually took its toll. The artisans who formed labor unions took pride in their craft skills (as shown in Chapter Four), so they were not likely to come out and explicitly indict the trade for sending them to an early grave, but various third-party reformers cited the perilous conditions that journeymen experienced on a daily basis. One article noted that bakers worked "from 110 to 120 hours per week, and sometimes 24 hours without cessation … in consequence of which their constitutions have been destroyed, and they have prematurely become tenants of the alms house or potters' field."58 A more scientific sounding warning came from the Journal of Health, which published an article on the "diseases of artisans" which included a section on stonecutters. It warned that these men suffered "by inhaling the volatilized particles given out in cutting and quarrying stone; and if they continue persistently at this kind of work, they fall victims to sundry diseases of the lungs, before they have passed the maturity of life."59 With such dire predictions, labor organizations eventually branched out from immediate household aid to more long-term contingency plans.

Union benefits not only served journeymen who fell on hard times and could not fulfill their breadwinning role for the family, they also aided organized working men who frequently called upon trade unions to aid their families in the eventuality of a member's death. While journeymen's position on New York's socio-economic ladder was not the most perilous, many unionists lived at the edges of comfort and could not enjoy the luxury of assuming they would have long and healthy lives. Long before social security and retirement accounts, the most a grieving family could hope for was a union payment of $10-20 for funeral expenses and a family pension.60 John F. Sickels' widow hoped for such a safety net when she applied to the Typographical Society in 1817 to request "the aid of the Society to support one of her children. Her husband, she said, when alive was a member of the Society, and therefore she appealed to that body."61

Journeymen's concern for upholding their household breadwinning duties even after their deaths also motivated the organizational rules that bound union members together. The Constitution of the New York Journeymen Shipwrights' and Caulkers' Society contained an article declaring that "on the death of a member, the President shall cause the Stewards to invite the Society to attend the funeral. The Standing Committee shall inquire into the circumstances of the family of the deceased, and if they are found necessitous, shall report them as such to the Society."62 The provision highlighted one of the fraternal aspects of early unionism by compelling organization members to attend a fallen brother's funeral, but more importantly the rules protected breadwinning ideology by enlisting union resources to ensure his family's comfort.

35

For the Journeymen Shipwrights and Caulkers, such articles proved to be more than rhetoric; the Society repeatedly invoked constitutional procedure when organizational affiliates passed away. Between May 1815 and June 1818 more than ten members passed away and the union's minute book noted the support of several deceased members' families, including a payment on October 12, 1815, of "$9 for the widow Mills." 63 A few years later, the union's account book recorded that "Widow Catherine Dunn" was "pensioned on August 19, 1819 by treasurer paid in two installments for the year on May 19 and November 19 at $17.50 per payment."64 As they did with sick benefits, union committees subjected death benefits requests to review in order to prevent abuses. Demonstrating that the union's benefit review mechanisms worked properly, the November 19th payment to Catherine Dunn marked exactly the one year anniversary of her husband Abraham Dunn's death.65 Even after breadwinners died, labor unions worked as their agents to help provide support for their families.

Strike Benefits

Journeymen, whether healthy or sick, did not always enjoy their employment; nevertheless, survival and economic household obligations required that when they could find employment, they worked. The only time skilled artisans collectively chose not to work was when they gambled that a short-term strike would yield long-term benefits for themselves and their families. However, even in the years before trade unions secured legal protection, thousands believed in the necessity of such risky ventures.66 Some contemporary critics chastised striking journeymen as selfish and irresponsible for choosing not to work even for one day when their families exhibited need. Like other aspects of the labor organizing and breadwinning, such controversies often turned on issues of manliness.

Cartoon Comparing Striking Unionists to Farm Animals Who Won't Work When the Journeymen Tailors' Union turned out for better breadwinning wages in 1833, the Journal of Commerce questioned the validity of a strike and whether proper husbands and fathers would act in such a way toward their hungry families. The tailors simply responded that "we consider ourselves too much the 'the man'" to give any credence to the Journal's insults.67 Whatever difficulties striking families endured, the tailors and other organized men felt justified that they acted to uphold their model of household-based masculinity.

Unions funded organized turnouts with whatever they could cobble together from meager dues and donations from sympathetic unions, rather than through massive, permanent war chests. Occasionally, even outside groups offered assistance to needy striking families whether or not they agreed with the labor movement. During one strike, an anti-union evangelical pamphlet specified on its cover that "profits of this Publication [are] to be applied for the benefit of Journeymen Tailors and their families, who are in distress," while trying to convince unionists to abandon their cause in favor of harder work.68

More often, well-wishers offered non-monetary support. The Typographical Society wrote a letter to the striking Cordwainers' Union to express their "good wishes" and blessings for the "success of their cause," but they could not help with a financial gift due to the "recent exhaustion of [their] own funds in assisting [their] own members who had stood out for wages."69 Before the mid-1830s, inter-union correspondence commonly conveyed such sentiments. Individual trade unions frequently did not have the financial apparatus or the infrastructure to pass along donations, but doubtless they would have forwarded the aid to their comrades if such mechanisms existed.

40

Inter-union relations changed dramatically in 1833, when the creation of the citywide General Trades' Union Convention pooled individual organizations' disparate funds together and increased strike benefit payments for workers' families. Founded "for the purpose of self-protection," the GTU grew out of an impromptu but concerted effort by journeymen of many craft backgrounds who "determined that they would aid" striking house carpenters.70 The monetary benefit of a collective approach to strike benefits literally paid off, spawning the GTU.

It is important to understand that it was the mechanism of better coordinating strike benefits to breadwinning working men and not any new particularized class movement that spurred the creation of the GTU and the mass trade union movement of the mid-1830s. Strike benefits, like sick or death benefits, crucially enabled domestic survival because they enabled organized men to maintain their capabilities as family providers while they engaged in activities that temporarily threatened their ability to maintain household obligations.

Underpaid, but cautious artisans did not disregard the prospect of more stable strike pay and breadwinner security; they quickly used the new system to agitate for better conditions. Of the slightly more than seventy-five strikes undertaken by labor unions between 1800 and 1840 in New York City, turnouts between 1833 and 1836 (the lifetime of the GTU) accounted for half of all the collective actions.71 Delegates to the GTU Convention clearly recognized the trend and flooded constitutional by-laws and committee debates with strike benefit procedures and regulations.72 Ely Moore, president of the GTU, warned employers that it would be "idle, altogether idle," to oppose the demands of striking union members if they were "backed by the [GTU] Convention."73

While the availability of strike benefits influenced the circumstances of collective action, it also contributed to trade union attempts to prescribe members' behavior. Strike guidelines in internal union documents, such as Constitutions and by-laws, not only explained the benefit dispersal process, but also tied the system to particular behavior for worthy striking men. The clearest example of this comes from the Typographical Society's Constitution: married striking members received $4 a week, single men received $3, and by-laws compelled active labor from payment recipients to ensure that such benefits provided only temporary support. Printers "thrown out of employment in consequence of not obtaining a price for his labor that shall be in accordance with the scale" could receive benefits only as long as they made an "effort to obtain another situation" and had not refused "honorable employment."74 Similar by-laws attempted to regulate other types of working men's behavior to ensure that the union only financially supported legitimate breadwinners.

Labor organizations, conscious of the centrality of breadwinning to their members' domestic obligations, made strike benefits available to provide for needy families; but as soon as recipients exploited the system, the validity of their breadwinning claims ended. The Journeymen Cordwainers' Constitution from 1817 stated that if any member receiving benefits, "be found engaged in his employment, or in spending his time in brothels or gambling," would be suspended from payments for one year.75 Such supervision was quite common: more than 15 years later, the House Carpenters' Union included the exact same language in Article 18 of its Constitution.76

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Because of its attempts to ensure a citywide closed shop, the Cordwainers' Union's behavior policing also extended beyond the current membership to those journeymen who might become future unionists. Outworking cordwainer William Dougherty was not a union member during a short turnout in October of 1811, when he labored "for a livelihood for himself & family," but still faced a union reprimand when he tried to join the organization a couple of weeks later. According to Dougherty's official complaint, the union asked him to pay a fine for bucking their rules about working during a strike and when he refused, he was "excommunicated from the Cordwainers' Society."77 Whether or not such coercive methods altered anyone's behavior is unclear, but various trade unions' commitment to such strict standards reinforced the importance of breadwinning and strike benefits to trade union activity.

While the dispensation of sick, death, and strike benefits provided a source of public pride for union members, vigilance against the corruption or waste of benefit money peppered union by-laws and internal debates. Unionists favored breadwinning ideology and acknowledged the importance of supporting members' wives and children, but deciding who was eligible for whatever meager funds could be raised posed more difficult problems. Given the pittance that most labor organizations mustered for benefits (especially before the creation of the GTU), debates surrounding even the smallest of pecuniary outlays took on vital significance.

Typographical Society minutes during these years show a number of conflicts concerning benefit eligibility. Strict guidelines about membership and behavior often required tough decisions and the centrality of breadwinning ideology to these organizations merely complicated matters. Even though fellow journeyman printer James Findley, "was reported to be sick, and himself and family in great distress, [t]he Board did not consider him entitled to the privileges of a member" because he had not followed their guidelines; nevertheless, certain members did pity his family and "threw in their mite for his relief."78 The Society certified Henry Back as a member, but after he took ill and decided to recuperate in "the southern clime," they would not guarantee benefits for his wife and children, who remained in New York.79 Although he protested and a month-long dispute ensued, the Society eventually stopped all payments to his family.

Conflicts over union benefits reached a fevered pitch within the Typographical Society in the late 1810s as Adoniram Chandler, elected president in 1815, moved debate on whether or not to maintain the organization in its original form as a part trade union/part benefit society. Under Chandler's leadership the organization decided to act solely as a benefit society, incorporating with the state of New York on February 17, 1818. The agreement allowed the Society to continue providing "relief to the indigent and distressed of their members," but in return for more secure legal and financial standing, it prohibited them from engaging in "regulation respecting the price or wages of labor workmen" in the trade.80 The incorporation measure engineered by Chandler may have spoken more to his conservative politics and vision for the "extension of benevolence, and the promotion of harmony," than to the majority of members' desire to stop regulating wages; but both factions understood the difficult task of trying to work collectively to uphold individual breadwinning.81

The temporary end of the Typographical Society as a trade union did not mean, however, that its members ended their labor-organizing careers. Edward S. Bellamy, for example, joined the society in his teens before being elected as one of the directors in 1815. Following the incorporation of the Society, Bellamy maintained his membership, acting as the keynote speaker at a July 4th celebration in 1821. However, ten years later, when Bellamy was in his mid-thirties, he joined the new journeymen printers' union in 1831. Following the House Carpenters' strike two years later, Edward Bellamy united with fellow printers John Finch and Willoughby Lynde to draft the circular that led to the formation of the General Trades' Union, where he would end his labor career as a union representative.82

Family Time and Breadwinning

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Upholding breadwinning as a vital part of household-based masculine duty required more of trade unionists than merely providing financially for their households; ideal breadwinners also secured enough hours outside of work to spend quality time with their families. While ensuring that their families had enough money to survive was of primary importance, journeymen breadwinners' duties did not end there. Organized men expected to take an active role in overseeing their family's moral, spiritual, and emotional lives and struggled to secure enough time to do so. This did not mean slacking in the workplace; rather it meant trying to achieve a balance between time on the job and time reserved for the family.

Journeymen did not uniformly pass time away from work and debated how to best spend their domestic leisure hours, but they never questioned that family time was one of their household obligations. It was therefore not strange that the same Masons' and House Carpenters' strike manifesto budgets which sought better breadwinning wages made sure to specify that unionists treasured their Sundays off of work and that they needed to save some money for "the maintenance of old age."83 Working men did not assume that retirement and family time during evening hours and Sundays was a luxury, but rather a necessity for fulfilling breadwinning ideology. Alongside unions' public rhetoric and private discussions arguing for pecuniary breadwinning, another discursive strain of breadwinning sought a shorter work day and promoted spending time with the family.

How many hours did a skilled journeyman work and how many how hours did he spend with his family in the first four decades of the nineteenth century? The question is simple to ask but difficult to answer simply. Like other aspects of workplace custom and regulation among craftsmen, significant variation existed between trades and decades. In the colonial era, journeymen and master artisans often worked side-by-side with the day's length set by individual masters based on the number of local orders.84 As amplified production separated masters' duties from journeymen, workday standards increasingly came under the purview of citywide craft regulations. Masters' organizations and journeymen's unions constantly debated the issue over the years, with many workers achieving a maximum ten-hour day by the second decade of the century.

Universal practices did not exist, however. A letter to the pro-labor newspaper The Man by "Anti-Eleven Hours" complained that even after shipbuilders achieved a nine-hour day and "all other trades work ten hours," bookbinders still labored daily for "eleven hours."85 During the early republic, journeymen bakers worked between fourteen- and eighteen-hour days and even made bread on Sunday mornings.86 Work hours stayed variable as bosses continued to try to extend hours and workers continued to try to limit hours. By the mid-1830s, a few organized men even called for an eight-hour day.87

The actual length of the workday only partly described how much labor artisans performed, as masters and journeymen slowly made the transition to modern forms of market capitalism and work-discipline.88 The complex nature of the transition can be seen in the attempt by master builders to impose a regulated set of hours for journeymen carpenter and masons. In order to end "much irregularity and confusion," master builders proposed a regimented schedule as early as 1805 that provided for ten hours of labor between the second Monday in March and the second Monday in November and nine hours during the darker winter months. The day varied slightly depending on the season, however, with work beginning sometime between six and seven in the morning and ending between five and seven in the evening. Time for breakfast and lunch also varied between one and three hours.89

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Builders were not unique in utilizing this type of schedule. Bookbinder John Bradford celebrated March 10th, the "Night On Which Journeymen Mechanics Cease Working By Candlelight," in a tune that included the lines:

For five months ev'ry night we were
Oblig'd to work till eight, sirs,
But lamps and candlesticks now are
Till October out of date, sirs.90

Such examples point to the ongoing workday negotiation underway in these years, whether bosses expected nine, ten, or fourteen hours of labor. Bosses eventually took measures to eliminate middle of the day distractions and increase the amount work performed.91 Negotiations to change the flow of the workday did not always go smoothly. Journeymen shipbuilders in Thacher Magoun's employ struck in 1817 when he tried to end periodic drinking breaks in order to prevent drunkenness and get more labor out of his workers. Working men referred to the drinking breaks as "luncheon times" and usually used the time to consume food as well as liquor.92 The strike was less about resisting the extra work as it was about an attempt to show Magoun that journeymen shipbuilders' vision of the workday included a certain balance between activity and leisure.

Part of the difficulty of reorganizing the workday according to regimented schedules was that without widespread agreement of accurate time, workers believed that bosses tried to exact extra work from them. The transformation from keeping estimated time based on tasks or daylight to telling more exact time based on clocks or watches was well under way during the early part of the nineteenth century, but rarely proceeded smoothly. New York City was not a factory town like Lowell or Waltham where one employer set (and often manipulated) time for the majority of workers; individual bosses tried to use the dearth of accurate time pieces to squeeze extra work from their employees.93

To remedy the situation, some artisans decided to take steps to ensure that they only worked for the hours they had negotiated. In 1831, fifty journeymen shipbuilders petitioned the city to ask for a "correct standard for the different hours of commencing and letting off work." The result of their agitation was the erection of a "Mechanics' Bell" in the shipbuilding district (Seventh Ward) to regulate their scheduled ten-hour workday.94 What is important about the interplay between journeymen and masters over work time is that such dialogues represent more than working men's attempt to control workplace production: they signal a battle to shape non-work time. Skilled artisans possessed a notion of the form and pace of craft work as they saw it, but their discussions concerning the number of hours they worked focused on their vision of leisure and family time.95

As household providers, organized men conceived of their time commitment to their families as a crucial component of upholding breadwinning ideology. Achieving a ten-hour or nine-hour workday was not an end unto itself. In both public rhetoric and internal trade union conversations, journeymen paired workplace demands with discussions citing the importance of domestic leisure time pursuits. Such activities included using time to study by themselves or instruct their families about proper morality.

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The National Trades' Union urged its readers to use their "leisure hours" wisely and concentrate on "the study of useful books" in order to help prevent their own and their families' decent down "the paths of profligacy and vice."96 Many apparently took the advice. One English observer wrote that for New York's working families, "reading," as well as "singing hymns and psalms, constitute the evening's amusement."97 Similarly, the minutes of the New York Typographical Society show a suggestion by the Committee of Vigilance to establish a Literary Club "for the encouragement of literature."98 Organized men seeking improvement could certainly have used a place to appreciate literature and study, but as pro-labor newspapers continually stressed, such advancements did not mean much unless breadwinners also transmitted them to their family. An article entitled, "Family Government," reminded fathers that the best thing they could do for "their own families and the community at large" was to "devote the evenings to their children."99 Such prescriptive advice was easier said than done for organized men, who could only manage to spend a limited amount of time at home with their families during the taxing work week.

Outside of the stolen leisure moment here and there, artisans considered the possibility of retirement their best chance to spend a concentrated amount of non-work time with their families. Most organized men could never afford retirement, but they still held out for the promise of a comfortable period when they could relax after they had "sacrificed [their] health" and their "private pecuniary interest."100 Working men looked forward to the "mellow influence of retirement" when they could spend their "last days with cheerfulness" and pass time with the "son of [their] bosom."101

While retirement sounded enticing, providing for current family needs while working was usually all journeymen could afford. This position led House Carpenters to ask in their 1809 strike manifesto, how are "fathers of families to judge what will be the amount of the surplus [of their wages] for the maintenance of old age?"102 Financial difficulties aside, artisans saw retirement as the ultimate reward for a career of successful breadwinning, when they would have a glut of time set aside for husbands and fathers to do what they pleased with their families.

The same aspects of household-based masculinity that provided an impetus for economic independence and subsequently led breadwinning journeymen to strike for higher wages also guided their desire for temporal independence. Organized men argued that it was "of vital importance to ourselves, our families and our children" to able to "dispose of our own time in such quantities as we deem and believe to be most conducive to our own happiness."103 While it seems reasonable for journeymen to demand control over their lives outside of the workplace, bosses viewed such rhetoric in a very different light. Master craftsmen realized the important relationship between their workers' desire for independence of leisure and independence of economics. So, while workers perceived the two points as interlocking aspects of breadwinning ideology, their employers regarded the argument as a threat to their control of production and workplace organization. Bosses fought such developments vigorously. Along with their anticipated resistance to requests for shorter workdays and higher wages, employers attempted to restrict employees' non-work activities. One of the most successful ways to do this was to get journeymen and their families to use Sundays for spiritual pursuits, rather than "scandalous" leisure pursuits.

With the exception of bakers, who could not embrace the "privileges of the Sabbath," very few artisans applied their skills on Sundays, but this did not prevent a prolonged public debate concerning how journeymen and their families spent the Sabbath in the early nineteenth century.104 The passage of New York's "act for suppressing immorality" on March 13, 1813, codified Sabbatarian notions and technically "forbid labor and recreation—business and pleasure," whether citizens followed such rules.105 Many employers supported the measures, figuring that workers who spent their day off in church rather than drinking and getting into trouble would be more productive when they returned to work. As Paul Johnson eloquently writes about employers' use of moral suasion in Rochester, "reform would come quietly and voluntarily, and it would come from the top."106

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The number of journeymen artisans that favored temperance and spending Sunday in the Lord's service in this period is difficult to calculate. Most likely some small percentage of organized men actively supported evangelical causes, another small percentage actively supported free thought and secular causes, and the mass in the middle considered themselves culturally Christian (whether Protestant or Catholic), but did not spend much time in church.107 Rev. Isaac Hecker, who along with his brothers John and George, joined the Loco Foco Party when he was just a teenage baker, later noted that "many of us had not any religion at all."108 Whether or not organized men advocated religious causes was not material to many journeymen; most organized working men simply wanted to make their own family's decision about how to spend their Sundays.

As breadwinners, working men accepted that family time could take either a spiritual or a non-spiritual form, as long as the ultimate decision rested with the head of the household and not with an outside force. So, when Robert Rantoul Jr., in an Address to the Workingmen of the United States of America reminded journeymen to "make good use of your Sundays," he did so only after declaring that "our time then is our own."109 The right of self-determination over one's household was so central to breadwinning ideology and skilled journeymen's position, that even the American Tract Society acknowledged it in a pamphlet meant to bring working men and their families into the evangelical fold.

In Saturday Night, two skilled mechanics discussed their plans for the upcoming Sunday over the pay table. Robert Wise noted that he has "a wife and family to provide for at home" before detailing his Sabbath activities. He boasted that "the children [will be] all clean, wife ready with the breakfast; and as soon as that is over, we prepare for family worship . . . the little ones all join—I set the tune, and my Sarah has got a pretty voice."110 Across the table, William Ready offered a very different proposal for the day off. He and his wife, along with two other couples, were planning a "pleasant party, to take a little recreation on the water."111 Ready eventually abandoned his scheduled activities, but not before Wise appealed to the breadwinner in him, reminding him that after the Sunday boating trip he would return home, "money all spent—wife perhaps out of humour [and] the children cross and sleepy."112 Far from the world of labor actions for higher wages, this example shows how central breadwinning ideology was to working men's household-based masculinity by providing economically, temporally, and even spiritually for the family.

The connections between home and work and the importance of breadwinning also permeated A Dialogue Between Strike and Steady, Two Journeymen Tailors, In Relation to Trades Unions, Etc., an anti-union pamphlet that appealed to artisans in the mid-1830s. Set in the homes of the two tailors, the men, their wives, and even sickly children partake in discussions concerning labor organizing, drinking, and providing for family obligations. Steady, a nonunion tailor, tells his union neighbor Strike that labor organizing is responsible for "leading men to the dramshops" and that all journeymen's household budgets would be met if they lay "off drink."113 Strike eventually heeds the message, due mostly to the fact that Steady always provides for his family comfortably, while Strike's own household suffers. By the end of the pamphlet, Strike acknowledges that he is "half sorry I ever joined" the union, while Steady's "good wife here has often fed my children, when their poor mother was starving at home in tears."114 The dialogue closes with Strike's own unnamed wife thanking Steady for restoring "a husband to his wife, a father to his children, and a man to his senses" and a closing comment from Strike that, "man and wife is union enough."115 Because journeymen's wives' voices are noticeably silent in printed labor materials, her statement is particularly poignant. The message of the anti-union pamphlet is clear: if you really want to provide for your family, you need to work harder and not engage in labor organizing. The subtext of the message is also clear: whether you are a sober evangelical or a hard-drinking free thinker, the real reason for working hard is family breadwinning.

Although anti-union forces, rather than organized working men, wrote the previous dialogue, the authors correctly appreciated how a tract discussing proper breadwinning hit at trade unionists' core issues during the 1830s. The pamphlet synthesized master artisans' gloss on their employees' breadwinning concerns and the language they used to express them. Such things would have been easy for bosses to learn. Breadwinning rhetoric dominated labor discourse in a number of public forms including newspaper articles, speeches, court proceedings, pamphlets, and tracts and throughout different artisans' trades: tailoring, carpentry, printing, cabinet making, ship-building, baking, and shoemaking.

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Organized men did not alter their championing of breadwinner ideology when they spoke amongst themselves within internal trade union meetings. The claim that organized journeymen adopted breadwinning language as mere rhetorical flourish to gather public support, then, does not bear close examination. Journeymen systematically supported breadwinning ideology as an integral part of their household-based masculinity and not simply through a hodgepodge of isolated anecdotal incidents.

As this chapter demonstrates, organized men identified a complex range of breadwinning obligations as central aspects of household-based masculinity and when confronted with a series of potential threats to upholding their domestic duties, used the collective strength of the labor movement to help them provide materially and mentally for their households. A very tangible, overarching concern for satisfying family responsibilities united the efforts of journeymen in strikes for higher wages (or to prevent pay cuts) and shorter working hours. For working men in the early nineteenth century, such responsibilities included earning enough to support a comfortable household budget and securing enough time outside work in the evening and on Sunday to oversee family governance.

Ely Moore, leader of the GTU and ostensibly the first pro-organized labor member of Congress, summed up why organized men felt compelled to act collectively to ward off domestic threats and uphold their breadwinning responsibilities. In a speech before the House of Representatives, he noted that trade unions "are a measure of self-defense and self-preservation." They are "necessary guards against the encroachments of mercenary ambition and tyranny, and the friends of exclusive privileges."116 Moore's point was clear: working men lived in a world surrounded by perceived economic and workplace threats to themselves and their families and formed labor organizations to defend their position as breadwinners. Without unions, argued Ely Moore, journeymen would be left "breadless and impotent," and for organized men who engaged their work and the market economy on behalf of their families, such a failure would have been disastrous.117

Notes:

Note 1: Evening Post, May 27, 1819. back

Note 2: One shilling equaled 12.5 cents. back

Note 3: Evening Post, May 31, 1819. Their budget noted that food cost $195, rent cost $60, fuel cost $13, and clothing cost $100. back

Note 4: American Citizen, April 10, 1809. back

Note 5: This chapter applies a definition of breadwinning which is purposefully broad enough to include the wide range of ways that organized men would have responded to their perceived household obligations. back

Note 6: Colin Creighton writes that scholarship on the rise of male breadwinning focuses primarily on the "debate over the causes of the domestic subordination of women within industrial-capitalist societies." See Colin Creighton, "The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal," Comparative Studies in Society and History: An International Quarterly 38, number 2 (April, 1996), 310. See also Christine Stansell, "Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City," in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds. Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 78-103,Jeanne Boydston, "The Woman Who Wasn't There: Women's Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States," in Paul Gilje, ed. Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early Republic (Madison: Madison House, 1997), Jeanne Boydston, "To Earn Her Daily Bread," in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen DuBois, eds., Unequal Sisters (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1994), 54, Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 152-163, Elizabeth Blackmar Manhattan For Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), and Seth Rockman, "Women's Labor, Gender Ideology, and Working-Class Households in Early Republic Baltimore," Explorations in Early American Culture 66 (1999), 174-200. A number of recent works on industrialism in England have also addressed the issues of breadwinning and domesticity in the Chartist movement, see Anna Clark, "The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s," Journal of British Studies 31, number 1 (January, 1992), 62-88, "The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage: Contrasting Assumptions," Journal of Social History 34, number 2 (2000), 261-281, and The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families From the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso Press, 1993), S. Horrell and Jane Humphries, "The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth Century Britain," International Review of Social History 42 (1997), 25-64, and A. Janssens, "The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate," International Review of Social History 42 (1997), 1-23. back

Note 7: Sean Wilentz, for example, only includes one brief footnote to the issue of breadwinning in his detailed study of the New York labor movement. See footnote 58 in Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 51. back

Note 8: On housing and shop arrangements for colonial craftsmen, see Billy Smith, The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990), Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York: New York University Press, 1950), and W. J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). back

Note 9: On what the change to the artisanal workshop meant for living arrangements between journeymen and masters, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 15-36. back

Note 10: For more on this, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work, 156-157. back

Note 11: For this process in New York City, see Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York: New York University Press, 1979) and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For Philadelphia, see Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980) and Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and William A. Sullivan, The Industrial Worker in Pennsylvania, 1800-1840 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1955). back

Note 12: National Laborer, (Philadelphia) November 12, 1836. back

Note 13: Trial of the Journeymen Cordwainers of the City of New York For a Conspiracy to Raise their Wages (New York: I. Riley, 1810), 47. back

Note 14: For more on gender as performance, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990), 134-141. back

Note 15: For more on the physical separation between home and work in early nineteenth-century New York City, see Diana diZerega Wall, The Archaeology of Gender: Separating the Spheres in Urban America (New York: Plenum Press, 1994), 17-60. back

Note 16: For more on the relationship between organized men and their wives, see Chapter One. back

Note 17: Martha May, "Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions, and the Family Wage," in Ruth Milkman, ed. Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of US Women's Labor History (Boston: Routledge, 1985). back

Note 18: National Trades' Union, July 12, 1834. back

Note 19: National Trades' Union, September 6, 1834. (Italics in original). Articles such as "A Good Wife" and "For the Ladies" were usually reprinted from other sources and not new copy from pro-labor editors. Many of these items had been circulating through the English popular press for decades, if not over a century. One American example, an altered version of "A Good Wife," can be found in George Dillwyn's commonplace book fifty years earlier. For the sake of this discussion, it is not significant that the material has been reprinted; what is important is its context. It is necessary to explore how and why it worked as prescriptive literature in the early nineteenth-century pro-labor press as opposed to another context. See "Model for a Good Wife," circa 1785 in George Dillwyn's Commonplace Book, page 81, Quaker Collection, Haverford College. On the development of the marital choice genre in American writing, see David S. Shields, "Happiness in Society: The Development of an Eighteenth-Century American Poetic Ideal," American Literature 55, number 4 (December, 1983), 541-559. back

Note 20: These messages did not only apply to married organized men. The continuity of union discourse about marriage and the evils of bachelorhood even as more unmarried men joined the labor movement in the 1830s demonstrated the expectation that younger men would someday marry and conform to the prescribed behavior. back

Note 21: On the role of transportation, see George Rodgers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1951) and Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). For an overview of the period's economic growth, see Robert Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (New York: Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1970), Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States 1790-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1966). back

Note 22: Henry Dacre, Sober Second Thoughts (New York: Henry Robinson, 1837). back

Note 23: William Cobbett, Cottage Economy; Containing Information Relative to the Brewing of Beer, Making of Bread Keeping of Cows, Pigs, Bees, Ewes, Goats, Poultry, and Rabbits, and Relative to Other Matters Deemed Useful in the Conducting of a Labourer's Family; To Which are Added, Instructions Relative to the Selecting, the Cutting and the Bleaching of the Plants of English Grass and Grain, For the Purpose of Making Hats and Bonnets; and Also Instructions for Erecting and Using Ice-Houses, After the Virginian Manner, To Which is Added The Poor Man's Friend; or, A Defense of the Rights of Those Who Do the Work, and Fight the Battles (New York: John Doyle, 1833), 48. back

Note 24: August 17, 1811. New York Typographical Society Minutes, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University. (Hereafter cited as NYTS Minutes). back

Note 25: For more on the Typographical Society, see George A. Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6: Study of a Modern Trade Union and Its Predecessors (Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, 1913), 41-104. back

Note 26: Papers of the Society of Journeymen Shipwrights and Caulkers, Roll of Members, May 1815-June 1818, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 27: "Letter of H. D. Bristol to the New York Typographical Society, April 22, 1839," New York City Typographical Society Papers, 1816-1885, New York Public Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 28: House Carpenters' Book of Prices, Made and Adopted by the Company of Master Builders For the City and County of New York (New York: Isaac Collins and Sons, 1802). Also in 1802, master cabinet makers created an extensive new book of prices that cut wages by up to 15% and resulted in a strike by journeymen. See American Citizen, December 22, 1802. back

Note 29: The Man, March 17, 1835. back

Note 30: The expense of purchasing food in the 1820s led the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism to publish a pamphlet entitled, Plain Directions on Domestic Economy: Showing Particularly What Are the Cheapest, and Most Nourishing Articles of Food and Drink, and the Best Modes of Preparation (New York: Samuel Wood & Sons, 1821), which provided working families tips on purchasing flour and recipes for cooking soup. back

Note 31: Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 417 and Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 168-181. On rent prices, see Robert A. Margo, "The Rental Price of Housing in New York City, 1830-1860," Journal of Economic History 56, number 3 (September, 1996), 605-625. back

Note 32: National Trades' Union, May 2, 1835. back

Note 33: National Trades' Union, May 23, 1835. back

Note 34: Asa Greene, A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Theatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers, Rogues, Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, &c. &c. (New York: Published by Asa Greene, 1837), 17. back

Note 35: Evening Post, January 30, 1815. back

Note 36: Evening Post, April 10, 1805. back

Note 37: American State Papers 560, Protection to Manufactures 16th Cong., 1st Sess., December 20, 1819, Finance vol. 3, 441. back

Note 38: The Democrat, April 2, 1836. (Italics mine). back

Note 39: New York Transcript, February 20, 1836. Even before the Great Fire, rents had increased annually at 10% to 12%, with many landlords expecting a payment of $25 or $30 in advance. On these trends and their effect on other artisan expenses, see National Trades' Union, April 4, 1835. back

Note 40: Seth Luther, An Address Delivered Before the Mechanics and Working-Men of the City of Brooklyn, on the Celebration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of American Independence, July 4, 1836 (Brooklyn: Alden Spooner and Sons, 1836), 10-11. back

Note 41: For more on "competency," see Bruce Laurie, "'Spavined Ministers, Lying Toothpullers, and Buggering Priests': Third-Partyism and the Search for Security in the Antebellum North," in Howard B. Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 101. back

Note 42: Union, May 24, 1836. This quote is excerpted from "An Original Song In Favor of Trades Unions, and Unanimity in its Supporters." back

Note 43: On Cholera outbreaks in 1832, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 13-98. back

Note 44: Thomas Ringwood, An Address, Delivered Before the Franklin Typographical Association of New York, and a Select Company; on the Fifth of July, 1802: In Commemoration of the Twenty-Seventh Anniversary of American Independence, and of the Third of the Association (New York: Southwick and Crooker, 1802), 16. back

Note 45: January 13, 1816, NYTS Minutes. back

Note 46: "Association of Working Men," Journal of Health, Conducted by an Association of Physicians 4, issue 2 (October, 1832), 45-46. For more on the workers' health, see The Man, March 13, 1834 and Stott, Workers in the Metropolis, 124-125, 180-185. back

Note 47: Evening Post, May 31, 1819. back

Note 48: The idea of private benefit organizations monitoring the activities of their recipients was not new to the early nineteenth century. See Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 155 and 166-168. back

Note 49: August 24, 1816, NYTS Minutes. back

Note 50: Edward S. Bellamy, Domestic Manufactures, the Source of Real Independence: An Oration, Delivered Before the New York Typographical Society, on the Celebration of their Twelfth Anniversary, July 4, 1821 (New York: J. Seymour, 1821), 19. back

Note 51: George Asbridge, An Oration, Delivered Before the New York Typographical Society, at Their Second Anniversary, on the Fourth of July, 1811 (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1811), 23. back

Note 52: See The Man, February 24, April 11, and June 14, 1834 for examples. John Clough, An Address, Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1801, Before the Franklin Typographical Association of New York, and a Select Company (New York: George F. Hopkins), 12. back

Note 53: The 1831 Constitution is reprinted in Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6, 108. back

Note 54: John H. Griscom, The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of New York. With Suggestions For its Improvement. A Discourse (With Additions) Delivered on the 30th December, 1844, at the Repository of the American Institute (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845), 11. back

Note 55: "Letter from John and Hester Parks to Their Father, December 8, 1827," in Benjamin Smith, ed., Twenty-Four Letters from Labourers in America to Their Friends in England 2nd ed. (London: Edward Rainford, 1829), 27-28. back

Note 56: Papers of the New York Union Society of House Carpenters - Constitution, By Laws, Roll of Members, 1833-1836, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 57: Papers of the New York Union Society of House Carpenters - Constitution, By Laws, Roll of Members, 1833-1836, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. The importance of tools is also seen in a poem by bookbinder John Bradford, who reminded artisans, "Brother shopmates beware how ye handle these tools." See John Bradford, The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding Stick of Paste Castle (Gotham: Printed For the Author, 1815), 15. back

Note 58: The Man, June 16, 1834. back

Note 59: "Diseases of Artisans," Journal of Health, Conducted by an Association of Physicians 1, issue 9 (January, 1830), 143. back

Note 60: Mark A. Lause, Some Degree of Power: From Hired Hand to Union Craftsman in the Preindustrial American Printing Trades, 1778-1815 (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 20. back

Note 61: August 16, 1817, NYTS Minutes. The Society appointed a committee to look into Mrs. Sickels' request. back

Note 62: New York Journeymen Shipwrights Society, Constitution of the New York Journeymen Shipwrights Society Adopted January 5, 1804 (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1804), 8. back

Note 63: Papers of the Society of Journeymen Shipwrights and Caulkers, Roll of Members, May 1815-June 1818 and Minute Book 1815-1816, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 64: Papers of the Society of Journeymen Shipwrights and Caulkers, Account Book 1818-1827, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 65: Papers of the Society of Journeymen Shipwrights and Caulkers, Roll of Members, May 1815-June 1818, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 66: The legal status of unions remained murky until the landmark Commonwealth v. Hunt (1840, 1842) case in Massachusetts. For more on the case, see Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press), 199-219 and Stephen Mayer, "People v. Fisher: The Shoemakers' Strike of 1833," New York Historical Society Quarterly 62, number 1 (January, 1978), 6-21. back

Note 67: Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, November 16, 1833. back

Note 68: A Dialogue Between Strike and Steady, Two Journeymen Tailors, In Relation to Trades Unions, Etc. (New York: n.p., 1836), 1. back

Note 69: Reprinted in George Barnett, "The Printers: A Study in Trade Unionism," American Economic Association Quarterly 10 (1909), 357-58. On the Typographical Society Committee meetings leading up to the drafting of the letter to the Cordwainers' Union see, February 24, March 3, 24, 31, 1810, NYTS Minutes. back

Note 70: John Finch, Rise and Progress of the General Trades' Union of the City of New York and its Vicinity. With An Address to the Mechanics in the City of New York, and Throughout the United States (New York: James Ormond, 1833), 1-2. For more on the House Carpenters strike of May, 1833, see Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, May 21, 1833 and New York Journal of Commerce, June 1, 1833. back

Note 71: For lists of strikes, see Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 194-195 and Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 411. back

Note 72: For example, see the by-laws from a special meeting of the GTU Convention in National Trades' Union, January 17, 1835. back

Note 73: Ely Moore, Trades' Unions. An Address to the Members of the General Trades' Union of New York, As Delivered By Ely Moore (London: John Cleave, 1834), 6. The speech was also published as Address Delivered Before the General Trades' Union of the City of New York at the Chatham Street Chapel, Monday, December 2, 1833 (New York, James Ormond, 1833). back

Note 74: Typographical Society's 1831 Constitution as cited in Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6, 112-113. back

Note 75: See Article 11 in United Benefit Society of Journeymen Cordwainers of the City of New York, Constitution of the United Benefit Society of Journeymen Cordwainers of the City of New York Agreed to October 20th, 1817 (New York: P. Van Pelt, 1817), 6. back

Note 76: See Article 18 in the Papers of the New York Union Society of House Carpenters - Constitution, By Laws, Roll of Members, 1833-1836, New York Public Library Rare Book and Manuscript Division. back

Note 77: The People v. James Melvin et al., November 9, 1811, Court of General Sessions, Indictment Papers, New York City Municipal Archives. The October labor action came only a year after the end of the 1809-1810 conspiracy trial in which the union had been defeated, but only lightly fined. For more on the cordwainers' cases see Marjorie S. Turner, The Early American Labor Conspiracy Cases, Their Place in Labor Law; a Reinterpretation (San Diego: San Diego State College Press, 1967), Leonard Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), Richard B. Morris, "Criminal Conspiracy and Early Labor Combinations," Political Science Quarterly 52 (1937), Ian M. G. Quimby, "The Cordwainers' Protest: A Crisis in American Labor Relations," Winterthur Portfolio 3, (1967), and Sean Wilentz, "Conspiracy, Power, and the Early Labor Movement: The People vs. James Melvin, et. al., 1811," Labor History 24, issue 4 (Fall, 1983). back

Note 78: November 30, 1816, NYTS Minutes. back

Note 79: February 7, 1818, NYTS Minutes. On the ongoing debate see also March 7, 1818, NYTS Minutes. back

Note 80: Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6, 79. For more on the fight over incorporation see Lause, Some Degree of Power, 61, 68, 77-78. back

Note 81: Adoniram Chandler, An Oration, Delivered Before the New-York Typographical Society, On Their Seventh Anniversary, July 4, 1816 (New York: J. Seymour, 1816), 9. Chandler later became an important figure as part of the moderate Cook Faction of the Working Men's Party. For more on Chandler, see Chapter Six. back

Note 82: For information on Bellamy, see his obituary in Columbian Sentinel, March 28, 1835, Finch, Rise and Progress of the General Trades' Union, 2-3, Stevens, New York Typographical Union No. 6, 162-163, and Bellamy, Domestic Manufactures, the Source of Real Independence. back

Note 83: Evening Post, May 31, 1819 and American Citizen, April 10, 1809. back

Note 84: See Howard B. Rock, "Independent Hours: Time and the Artisan in the New Republic," in Gary Cross ed., Worktime and Industrialization: An International History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 27 and David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (New York: Verso Press, 1989), 1-18. back

Note 85: The Man, May 31, 1834. (Italics in original) back

Note 86: On Bakers, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 139-140, Roediger and Foner, Our Own Time, 11, and Howard B. Rock, "The Perils of Laissez-Faire: The Aftermath of the New York Bakers' Strike of 1801," Labor History 17 (Summer, 1976), 372-387. back

Note 87: See Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 232-233. back

Note 88: For an excellent discussion of the transition from pre-modern notions of time to capitalism and clock-based work time, see E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present Society 38 (December, 1967), 56-97. back

Note 89: Company of Master Builders, Whereas Experience Has Shewn that Much Irregularity and Confusion Has Taken Place for Want of a Uniform Regulation (New York: Isaac Collins & Sons, 1805). back

Note 90: Bradford, The Poetical Vagaries of a Knight of the Folding Stick of Paste Castle, 50. back

Note 91: Richard Trevellick, a leader of the Knights of Labor and the National Greenback Party in the 1870s and 1880s, remembered that a number of events broke up the sunup to sundown workday when he apprenticed in the shipbuilding neighborhood a generation earlier. A steady series of men and women who came by selling "crullers, doughnuts, gingerbread . . . sticky candy" and other snacks made constant labor impossible. Quoted in George McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (New York: M. W. Hazen Company, 1887), 342. See also Gustav Adolf Kleene, "History of the Ten-Hour Day in the United States," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1896), 3-5. back

Note 92: Ibid., 333. back

Note 93: On the manipulation of clocks by employers, see Roediger and Foner, Our Own Time, 20, 47-51. back

Note 94: Petition of Isaac Hadders et al., City Clerk Filed Papers, Street Commissioners, 1831, New York City Municipal Archives. On the Mechanics Bell see Roediger and Foner, Our Own Time, 20, Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 137, and McNeill, Labor Movement, 345-347. back

Note 95: For more on skilled journeymen's vision of the workplace, see Chapter Four. back

Note 96: National Trades' Union, August 16, 1834. back

Note 97: William Clark, The Mania of Emigrating to the United States, and its Disadvantages Developed: With a Correct Statement of the Prices of Provision, and Journeymen and Laborer's Wages: and a Dissertation on America Becoming a Manufacturing Country, With the Injustice of American Bankrupt Laws: To Which is Added a Description of New York, With the Effects of the Climate on Europeans: In Five Parts (London: B. Stiell, 1820), 29. back

Note 98: June 15, 1816, NYTS Minutes. back

Note 99: National Trades' Union, February 13, 1836. back

Note 100: Luther, An Address Delivered Before the Mechanics and Working-Men of the City of Brooklyn, 21. For more on retirement, see Laurie, "'Spavined Ministers, Lying Toothpullers, and Buggering Priests,'" 101 and Rock, "Independent Hours," 29-30. back

Note 101: Independent Mechanic, February 15, 1812. back

Note 102: American Citizen, April 10, 1809. back

Note 103: National Trades' Union, May 16, 1835. The quotes come from a circular issued by a meeting of House Carpenters, Masons, and Stone Cutters in Boston but reprinted in New York City. back

Note 104: The Man, June 16, 1834. For more on work and leisure on Sunday, see Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 9-20. back

Note 105: See Thomas Herttell, The People's Rights Re-claimed; Being an Exposition of the Unconstitutionality of the Law of the State of New York Compelling the Observance of a Religious Sabbath Day; and Erroneously Entitled "An Act for Suppressing Immorality," Passed March 13th, 1813; Addressed to the People of the State of New York (New York.: A. Spooner, 1826), 7. The 1813 law prevented "working (works of necessity and charity excepted), shooting, fishing, sporting, playing, horse-racing, hunting, or frequenting of tippling-houses." See ibid., 67. back

Note 106: Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium, 80. back

Note 107: Part of the reason that it is so difficult to decipher the religiosity of New York's working male population is that the sources that might quantify different groups are incomplete or unreliable. There was also a tacit agreement that whenever a labor organization was formed, religious concerns were off-limits. For example, see the prospectus of the pro-labor newspaper, The Union, which was sanctioned by the General Trades' Union, which included the notice that, "religious or irreligious discussions, will be excluded from our columns." The prospectus was printed in The Democrat, March 9, 1836. Agreements such as this derived from the feeling that denominational differences would cause disunion if religious subjects were highlighted. In smaller cities, organized labor sometimes took on a more explicit religious or evangelical persona. See Jama Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America (Washington DC: Smithsonian Press, 1995), William R. Sutton, Journeymen For Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, and David G. Hackett, The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany, New York 1652-1836 (New York: Oxford Press, 1991). back

Note 108: Rev. Isaac T. Hecker, "Dr. Brownson and the Working Man's Party Fifty Years Ago," Catholic World 45 (May, 1887), 203. back

Note 109: Robert Rantoul Jr., An Address to the Workingmen of the United States of America (Charlestown: n.p., 1833), 72 and 75. back

Note 110: Saturday Night: A Dialogue Between William Ready and Robert Wise, at the Pay Table (New York: American Tract Society, [182?]), 2 and 7. back

Note 111: Ibid., 3. back

Note 112: Ibid., 10. back

Note 113: A Dialogue Between Strike and Steady, Two Journeymen Tailors, In Relation to Trades Unions, Etc., 4-5. back

Note 114: Ibid., 7. back

Note 115: Ibid., 9 and 14. back

Note 116: Ely Moore, Speech in Reply to Waddy Thompson and Others: In House of Representatives, May 5, 1836 (Washington: Blair and Rivers, 1836), 11. back

Note 117: National Trades' Union, August 9, 1834. See also Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 239. back