The influx of immigrants does not entirely explain the low standard of living of industrial workers during this period. Low wages and the crowding that resulted from the swift expansion of city populations produced slums that would make the most noisome modern ghetto seem a paradise. A Boston investigation in the late 1840s described one district as “a perfect hive of human beings. . . huddled together like brutes.” In New York tens of thousands of the poor lived in dark, rank cellars, those in the waterfront districts often invaded by high tides. Tenement houses like great gloomy prisons rose back to back, each with many windowless rooms and often without heat or running water.
Out of doors, city life for the poor was almost equally squalid. Slum streets were littered with garbage and trash. Recreational facilities were almost nonexistent. Police and fire protection in the cities were pitifully inadequate. “Urban problems” were less critical than a century later only because they affected a smaller part of the population; for those who experienced them, they were, all too often, crushing. In the mid-1850s large numbers of children in New York scrounged a bare existence by begging and scavenging. They took shelter at night in coal bins and empty barrels.
In the early factory towns, most working families maintained small vegetable gardens and a few chickens; low wage rates did not necessarily reflect a low standard of living. But in the new industrial slums even a blade of grass was unusual. In 1851 the editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune published a minimum weekly budget for a family of five. The budget, which allowed nothing for savings, medical bills, recreation, or other amenities (Greeley did include 12 cents a week for newspapers), came to $10.37. Since the weekly pay of a factory hand seldom reached $5, the wives and children of most male factory workers also had to labor in the factories merely to survive. And child labor in the 1850s differed fundamentally from child labor in the 1820s. The pace of the machines had become much faster by then, and the working environment more debilitating.
Relatively few workers belonged to unions, but federations of craft unions sprang up in some cities, and during the boom that preceded the Panic of 1837, a National Trades Union representing a few northeastern cities managed to hold conventions. Early in the Jackson era, “workingmen’s” political parties enjoyed a brief popularity, occasionally electing a
A girl stares blankly as the manager of an employment agency suggests her suitability as a maid or housekeeper. The lady, seated, ponders whether the girl will do. The sign on the wall reads, "Agent for Domestics: Warranted Honest.” This painting is by William Henry Burr, 1849. Source: Assession no. 1959.46 Collection of The New-York Historical Society.
Few local officials. These organizations were made up mostly of skilled craftsmen, professional reformers, and even businessmen. They soon expired, destroyed by internal bickering over questions that had little or nothing to do with working conditions.
The depression of the late 1830s led to the demise of most trade unions. Nevertheless, skilled workers improved their lot somewhat in the 1840s and 1850s. The working day declined gradually from about twelve and a half hours to ten or eleven hours. Many states passed ten-hour laws and laws regulating child labor, but they were poorly enforced. Most states, however, enacted effective mechanic’s lien laws, giving workers first call on the assets of bankrupt and defaulting employers, and the Massachusetts court’s decision in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), establishing the legality of labor unions, became a judicial landmark when other state courts followed the precedent.
The flush times of the early 1850s caused the union movement to revive. Many strikes occurred, and a few new national organizations appeared. However, most unions were local institutions, weak and with little control over their membership. The Panic of 1857 dealt the labor movement another body blow. Thus there was no trend toward the general unionization of labor between 1820 and the Civil War.
For this the workers themselves were partly responsible: Craftsmen took little interest in
Unskilled workers except to keep them down. Few common laborers considered themselves part of a permanent working class with different objectives from those of their employers. Although hired labor had existed throughout the colonial period, it was only with the growth of factories and other large enterprises that significant numbers of people worked for wages. To many people, wage labor seemed almost un-American, a violation of the republican values of freedom and independence that had triumphed in the Revolution. Jefferson’s professed dislike of urban life was based in part on his fear that people who worked for wages would be so beholden to their employers that they could not act independently.
This republican value system, along with the fluidity of society, the influx of job-hungry immigrants, and the widespread employment of women and children in unskilled jobs made labor organization difficult. The assumption was that nearly anyone who was willing to work could eventually escape from the wage-earning class. “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer,” Abraham Lincoln declared in 1859, “it is. . . because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”
World History
