A History of Trade Unionism in the United States | Page 4

It was brought to a head by the severe industrial
depression of the time. But the decisive impulse came from the
nation-wide democratic upheaval led by Andrew Jackson, for which the
poorer classes in the cities displayed no less enthusiasm than the
agricultural West. To the wage earner this outburst of democratic fervor
offered an opportunity to try out his recently acquired franchise. Of the
then industrial States, Massachusetts granted suffrage to the
workingmen in 1820 and New York in 1822. In Pennsylvania the
constitution of 1790 had extended the right of suffrage to those who
paid any kind of a state or county tax, however small.
The wage earners' Jacksonianism struck a note all its own. If the farmer
and country merchant, who had passed through the abstract stage of
political aspiration with the Jeffersonian democratic movement, were
now, with Jackson, reaching out for the material advantages which
political power might yield, the wage earners, being as yet novices in
politics, naturally were more strongly impressed with that aspect of the
democratic upheaval which emphasized the rights of man in general
and social equality in particular. If the middle class Jacksonian was
probably thinking first of reducing the debt on his farm or perchance of
getting a political office, and only as an after-thought proceeding to
look for a justification in the Declaration of Independence, as yet the
wage earner was starting with the abstract notion of equal citizenship as
contained in the Declaration, and only then proceeding to search for the
remedies which would square reality with the idea. Hence it was that
the aspiration toward equal citizenship became the keynote of labor's
earliest political movement. The issue was drawn primarily between the
rich and the poor, not between the functional classes, employers and
employes. While the workmen took good care to exclude from their
ranks "persons not living by some useful occupation, such as bankers,
brokers, rich men, etc.," they did not draw the line on employers as
such, master workmen and independent "producers."

The workingmen's bill of complaints, as set forth in the Philadelphia
Mechanic's Free Press and other labor papers, clearly marks off the
movement as a rebellion by the class of newly enfranchised wage
earners against conditions which made them feel degraded in their own
eyes as full fledged citizens of the commonwealth.
The complaints were of different sorts but revolved around the charge
of the usurpation of government by an "aristocracy." Incontrovertible
proof of this charge was found in special legislation chartering banks
and other corporations. The banks were indicted upon two counts. First,
the unstable bank paper money defrauded the wage earner of a
considerable portion of the purchasing power of his wages. Second,
banks restricted competition and shut off avenues for the "man on the
make." The latter accusation may be understood only if we keep in
mind that this was a period when bank credits began to play an
essential part in the conduct of industry; that with the extension of the
market into the States and territories South and West, with the resulting
delay in collections, business could be carried on only by those who
enjoyed credit facilities at the banks. Now, as credit generally follows
access to the market, it was inevitable that the beneficiary of the
banking system should not be the master or journeyman but the
merchant for whom both worked.[4] To the uninitiated, however, this
arrangement could only appear in the light of a huge conspiracy entered
into by the chartered monopolies, the banks, and the unchartered
monopolist, the merchant, to shut out the possible competition by the
master and journeyman. The grievance appeared all the more serious
since all banks were chartered by special enactments of the legislature,
which thus appeared as an accomplice in the conspiracy.
In addition to giving active help to the rich, the workingmen argued,
the government was too callous to the suffering of the poor and pointed
to the practice of imprisonment for debt. The Boston Prison Discipline
Society, a philanthropic organization, estimated in 1829 that about
75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United States.
Many of these were imprisoned for very small debts. In one
Massachusetts prison, for example, out of 37 cases, 20 were for less
than $20. The Philadelphia printer and philanthropist, Mathew Carey,

father of the economist Henry C. Carey, cited a contemporary Boston
case of a blind man with a family dependent on him imprisoned for a
debt of six dollars. A labor paper reported an astounding case of a
widow in Providence, Rhode Island, whose husband had lost his life in
a fire while attempting to save the property of the man who later caused
her imprisonment for a debt of 68 cents. The physical conditions in
debtors' jails were appalling, according