The Labor Movement in the United States of America – Part 3

A presentation at the January 2007 party meeting in Sarzana [RG97]

From Independence to Secession

The average American, in the decades after the War of Independence, was the very epitome of self-sufficiency and versatility, capable of driving a plough, fixing a wheel on his cart, repairing his own boots and weaving on the familial loom. But the famous Noah Webster, who wrote in 1785 that it would remain such “so long as there is a vast tract of fertile land to cultivate,” was wrong. Already there were the first signs of those enormous changes that would turn small holders and artisans into wage labourers.

Three interdependent forces characterise this epoch making transformation, this real industrial revolution: the market, transportation and manufacture. In the process we will witness the bourgeois revolution in the United States drawing to a close, having achieved a politico-economic transformation which would only be completed in the second half of the 19^th century.

The revolution in the market, already well underway by the 1780s, would remove the incentive to produce articles for direct personal use, encouraging instead the production of commodities for sale. This meant, for the farmers with small and medium sized holdings throughout the country and for the planters in the South, transferring capital and human resources from subsistence agriculture to that of products that could be sold on the market, in other words, cereals for the small farmer and industrial scale cultivation of tobacco and cotton for the planter. For the rural artisan the commercial revolution marked the end of the age of the itinerant worker, when the norm was to visit the farms in order to exchange the articles he had made for agricultural products. The artisan in the town, meanwhile, was compelled to employ more apprentices and specialised workers in order to produce enough to sell and to keep the shelves well-stocked. At any rate the novelty was the prominent role which money was assuming as the means of effecting exchange, and as regulator of social relations.

The revolution in transportation went through several phases. First there was the development of the road network, including the toll roads which started to appear in the 1790s. Around 1820 the great canal building projects got underway, creating a network of navigable canals into the interior. And in the decade that followed, a railway network began to take shape. All these arterial routes had the effect of extending the market and of stimulating the industrial revolution. The new means of transport meant rural America was inundated with manufactured articles which had traditionally been produced in the home. Demand from the country was stimulated and this prompted the supply from the city. One consequence of this was an excess of manpower in the country: manpower that was rendered available for use in the nascent industries.

In its early days the industrial revolution can’t be identified with the rise of the factory system. In fact, even if the factory represented, then as now, the most visible manifestation of manufacture as a system of production, it still only constituted a relatively small part of the industrial scene before the Civil War. In 1860 wage-earners in small firms and workshops still outnumbered those in factories, and the vast majority still used manual tools rather than machinery powered by water, steam or other kinds of energy. The industrial revolution of smoky factories and deafening machines was still in its infancy in pre-war America.

Actually by 1860 none of the revolutions we have mentioned had yet run their course; each of them had developed in an irregular way, geographically as well, taking off much faster in the North, and later on, in the Midwest, than in the South, which never became industrialised to a significant degree.

Any reliable account must bear in mind that the independent homesteader, the cultivator of his own land was, at the turn of the 18^th Century and for many years thereafter, the backbone of the Union. In 1790, nine out of ten Americans lived off the land, and even in 1860 it was still 8 out of 10. The economy of the small farmer was based on self-sufficiency: as well as tilling the soil and stock raising, and related agrarian industries, other activities such as spinning and weaving were carried out inside the family unit. Still in the 1840s the quantity of woven goods produced in the home surpassed the amount produced in the textile mills, and these woven goods were used to acquire necessary products such as objects made from metal, and tea, etc. Things were acquired by bartering for them and there was very little money in circulation: it was rare, jealously guarded, and only there to be used when there was no alternative, such as paying taxes, in some States, and acquiring land for ones children.

Pioneer tradition indeed dictated that males leaving home would be provided with a parcel of land and females with a dowry. Initially finding new land wasn’t that difficult, you just ploughed it up and got on with it; but when, at the beginning of the 19^th Century, land in the Atlantic States started to run out, the solution had to be either reducing the amount of land you distributed to your sons (and a certain minimum amount was needed if they were to live off it), or finding it elsewhere, and elsewhere meant the West. Thus there was the first wave of emigration, in order to search for land beyond the Appalachians. In the North there was the populating of the States of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, extending up to the most northerly of the lakes; in the centre, Tennessee and Kentucky; in the South the movement was towards the Gulf, across what would become the States of Mississippi and Alabama, and as far as ex-French Louisiana.

An important consequence of agricultural development west of the Appalachians was a big increase in cereal production, partly destined, insofar as a surplus existed, for the market. But the markets were now at some distance from the new zones of production, and the need arose to equip the country with an adequate infrastructure. This was achieved in the first half of the 1800s, as we have seen, even if on the eve of the Civil War the greater part of transportation down the valleys of the Ohio to the Atlantic ports (mainly New York and Baltimore) was still carried by river down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and then by sea across the Atlantic. In the South the development of transportation was very inferior with respect to the North, and for this reason the farmers in the South were a lot poorer than their counterparts in the North; a factor which also gave rise to the ‘poor whites’ of the South.

Developments in transport also had the consequence of breaking down production in the home due to the ever lower prices of industrial goods. Barter on the other hand became increasingly difficult, and more and more farmers were forced to produce for the market. Farming was becoming mechanised, but machines cost money. Those who didn’t manage to increase their productivity to certain levels had to sell their land and move into commerce or, in many cases, become wage labourers. The most immediate effect of all this was the growth of the cities.

Between 1820 and 1860 the country’s population would increase by 230%, from under 10 million to just over 30 million, an average increase of 2.8% per annum. At the end of this period less than one American in five lived in urban centres of over 8,000 inhabitants. But the growth of cities was tumultuous, if one considers that their populations increased by 800%. But immigrants, who are generally linked to urbanisation, played a smaller role than one might in this demographic explosion. In 1860 there were only around 4 million, and considerably more than half of these had arrived between 1846 and 1857, when the urban boom was drawing to a close, and only half of them settled in the city. In actual fact the urbanisation of this period derived mostly from the natural increase of the city’s inhabitants and from internal migrations. The drift between town and country therefore maintained a kind of equilibrium until the 1850s. This was not the case with immigration, with successive waves arriving from the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The main increase occurred in 1846-7, when the number of immigrants rose from 82,000 to more than 142,000. From then on there was a regular increase until a pre-war maximum of 267,000 individuals was reached in 1851. From then until 1858, despite slowing up slightly, the rate of immigration never fell below the 1847 figure; and in just those 11 years around 2 million Europeans would disembark onto American shores. In 1860 emigrants would make up a third of the inhabitants of the 40 main urban centres.

But far from constituting a problem, the immigrants found themselves in a situation which could absorb their labour power: the development of the industrial revolution. Before the immigration explosion at the end of the ‘40s, industrial and craft activities were the prerogative of white males who had been born in the country, as much in the North as in the South. Working women were to be found mainly in domestic service or in non-specialised activities within the textile industry, as well as in a few other unskilled trades. The relatively few immigrants were divided into English and German skilled workers on the one hand, and unskilled Irish workers on the other.

The black freemen were concentrated in the ports, sometimes it seems in the skilled trades as well, and in the building trades. In the South, of course, slaves considerably outnumbered black freemen although there were some who worked as craftsmen and artisans in the cities. The Skilled labour of the slaves was essential in the tobacco industry and in the steelworks of Virginia, but they were nevertheless employed in far greater numbers in what was then contemptuously referred to as “nigger work”; in activities considered menial, dirty or unpleasant, or at least beneath the “dignity” of the white man, such as that of the barber and the butcher. Most commonly, slaves were assigned to unskilled activities of various kinds. In any case, what was “nigger work” to some might be much sought after by others, and just as the native white workers sought to exclude slaves from skilled work, so did immigrants try to exclude black freemen from unskilled work, even resorting to violence.

The heavy influx of immigrants in the middle of the century transformed the ethnic composition and occupational composition of the labour force in both halves of the country. White natives held on to the better paid, so-called “respectable” trades. Women and immigrants found jobs in the declining semi-skilled trades, and the Irish replaced ‘the Yankees’ in the textile industry. The Blacks and the Irish divided up the unskilled work. What had been an ethnically homogeneous working class in the 1850s had become a heterogeneous and polyglot mass.

Early Industrial Development

At the time of the War of Independence, only very few productive activities, such as those in the iron and steel and shipbuilding industries, were conducted on a large scale. Most manufacturing activities, such as in the woollen industry and indeed in the iron and steel industry, were held back by competition from England where there was an abundance of low cost skilled labour and appropriate infrastructures in place. Since, because of the war, trade had been paralysed, the transport infrastructure destroyed and many of the most flourishing districts laid waste, the recovery and economic reconstruction would be slow and based on agricultural activities to begin with.

On the other hand, the rapid growth in the population, which rose from 4 to 31 million between 1790 and 1860, along with improvements in transportation would enormously expand the domestic market for manufactures, and despite significant competition from English exporters it would offer significant opportunities to American entrepreneurs. In an initial phase these ventures would combine to profit from domestic labour, as in the case of shoemaking, where the capitalist was able to reduce costs and sell his shoes at low prices over a considerable area.

But as the new century dawned, it would be the textile industry, above all in New England, which first developed along the lines of the English factories, through its use of machinery powered by steam and by water. Whilst gradually bringing about the disappearance of domestic labour, it was the first industry to bring large numbers of workers together in genuine factories. The cotton industry would really start to take off in the latter years of the 18^th Century in Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts to the North of Boston. The two areas were different in certain key respects; to the North of Boston the industry relied on the labour of women who came from the farms of New England. Normally they were young unmarried women who would often spend only a very brief part of their lives earning a wage, which would usually go towards funding their wedding day. They were accommodated in model lodging houses built by the Company and were subject to rigorous rules of conduct. This was the famous “Lowell System”, admired by foreign visitors for the intellectual, cultural and sanitary regime it bestowed on its workers. In Rhode Island, on the other hand, they adopted a system resembling the English one, of employing entire families, including children, without any regard for the quality of their family life. These two areas constituted the greater part of the cotton industry, although there were some factories in New Jersey and around Philadelphia as well. In the same areas a woollen industry, also mechanised, developed too, although this would develop much more slowly. We should mention, in any case, that production of cotton and woollen textiles in the home remained relatively high until the middle of the 19^th Century.

Other industries which developed were those of sugar-cane processing, metallurgy, the making of metal articles and tools, and the production of other objects without any particular craft tradition. In other sectors, the growth of the factory system occurred much later on in the period currently under consideration, that is, between the end of the War of Independence and the outbreak of the Civil war.

The nascent American manufactory had the advantage of setting out from a situation in which production was highly standardised, allowing complex assemblages to be constructed using interchangeable components. Early progress in this field was made in the production of small arms, but by the middle of the century the technique was being applied to clocks, locks, agricultural machinery and equipment, and sewing machines. Many of these products, which could now be assembled by unskilled workers, were beginning to replace the imported versions of the same goods, which required highly specialised labour. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, American industry was in a position to exhibit a number of devices and procedures which were technically in advance of the English; and European engineers suddenly realised there was something to be learned from their trans-Atlantic rivals. And this was all the more remarkable considering the small scale of American industry at the time, both compared to England and taking into account the size of the country.

In 1860, if in New England only 1 citizen in 8 was employed in some kind of manufacturing activity (not just in factory work), elsewhere the figure was even lower: 1 in 15 in the middle states, 1 in 48 in the West, and 1 in 82 in the South. Thus one can safely say that up until the time of the Civil War the United States of America was predominantly an agricultural country.

In the major towns of Massachusetts up until the 1830s and 1840s, most of the industrial labour was therefore supplied by women. We have seen how in the South, in the iron and steel industries, slaves were also used as well, but since these had to be acquired or hired from their proprietors, they weren’t ever as competitive as the better organised “free” labour in the North.

Apart from the iron and steel industry in Richmond, most factory workers weren’t a part of the urban proletariat as the new industries were situated in small country towns, where it was easier to harness water power. But even in these towns the extent of factory production was still far from the levels that would be achieved after the Civil War. Indeed in 1860 the labour power employed in industry, in two important urban centres like Lowell (Mass.) and Lynn, was still no more than a third and a half of the total, respectively, and they were special cases. In none of the other fifteen most important cities did the level of proletarian concentration in big industry even approach that. If in Newark (New Jersey) it was as high as 25%, in cities like New York and St. Louis it was less than 10%. The era of the industrial city hadn’t yet begun.

The greater part of production still consisted of handmade goods, and was produced in small and medium sized workshops. Within this stratum of small producers, relations of labour had barely changed over the past centuries, and as in the European countries which had still not been revolutionized by big industry, there was the proprietor of the workshop (the master), the skilled worker (the journeyman) and the apprentice.

The artisan was equipped with a set of typical tools of his craft, enabling him to make the finished product. The masters were proprietors who did everything, from maintaining relations with their customers and ordering raw materials, to keeping the accounts. In addition they planned the work, supervised their young apprentices, and worked alongside their subordinates. For the most part they were ex skilled workers, expert workers formerly paid by the day or on a piece work basis, depending on the craft. These journeymen in their turn had been apprentices, who had started in the trade when still adolescents and spent from three to seven years learning the secrets of the craft under the tutelage of their master. The apprentice didn’t receive a salary, just food and lodging and little else; in general his family provided the rest. They could be punished by the master when they were insubordinate, although they could seek redress by appealing to the authorities. Between the age of 18 and 21, an apprentice was promoted to journeyman. He would receive a suit of clothes and a set of tools of the craft as recognition of his formal admission into the craft brotherhood. For the first time he had a right to a salary, even if often not very much, and not necessarily guaranteed in the long term. In the most fortunate cases journeymen were aspiring masters, who worked with alacrity to put aside money so they could set up on their own, even if it involved taking over their former boss’s concern.

The rhythms of work resembled those in rural activities. When orders were irregular, the periods of inactivity were often spent discussing a whole range of subjects. Pre-industrial revolution artisans were relatively well-read and with a rich intellectual life.

The industrial revolution in North America was preceded by a period between the 1820s and 1840s in which the craft workshop underwent major changes. The first important transformation was an increase in the number of people employed in the workshop, rising to a few dozen or so and threatening the traditional equilibrium between the three roles just described. The consequence was richer proprietors, less and less hope for the journeymen of setting up on their own (we can date the precocious death of the “American Dream” to this period, with its subsequent existence a mere mirage for the overwhelming majority of proletarians) and apprentices seen more and more as low cost labour rather than as future artisans. There then followed the transformation of the mode of working typical of the factory, whether through the introduction of machinery, or by sub-dividing the working process into a number of simple phases, allowing non-specialised, and therefore cheaper and easily replaceable, labour to be taken on such as women and children. Finally, there was a reduction in the typology of products. All these changes had as their consequence an increase in production and a lowering of the costs of production. These changes also dealt a blow to domestic production, which even if it was less costly, and symbolic of the most virulent capitalist exploitation, had nevertheless become less productive that the factory.

It is worth recalling that the initial phase of this process, that is, up to the 1850s, was extremely slow; and same was the case as regards the mechanisation of agriculture. The process, furthermore, happened in a very selective way, depending on the sector: more slowly among the blacksmiths, bakers and butchers, more quickly among the tailors, shoemakers and carpenters.

In any case, up until the outbreak of the war there were still far more craft workshops than capitalist enterprises. The issue, of course, presents itself in a very different way if the total mass of products is taken into account.

Despite everything, a lot had changed. The pre-industrial world of self-sufficient peasant farmers and independent craftsmen was receding into a past that could never return. The accelerating commercial revolution pushed systems of exchange based on barter to the margins of the economy, and loosened the bonds that had tied generations of Americans to the land. The first stirrings of the industrial revolution created a new stratum of proprietors who were no longer master craftsmen but entrepreneurs, determined to make money in an economy of savage and no holds barred competition. Even a working class was coming into being, and even if it wasn’t yet an army of out and out factory slaves, its component elements were becoming increasingly dependent on wages alone, whilst gradually losing any craft ability and becoming subjected to a rigid pace of work and set hours. It was a transformation whose beginnings may be traced back to the 1820s, to that period later known as the ‘Era of Good Feelings’. The happy age for the small, free American producer would become an American myth.

Workers’ Associations

Mechanics’ and artisans’ associations had emerged in the last quarter of the 18^th Century, often as clandestine committees formed in the period of the War of Independence, or as friendly societies. The oldest was the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York dating back to 1785. These groups reflected the consciousness of a community traditionally split across innumerable crafts, but one becoming increasingly aware of its common interests. Amongst their aims were the following: applying pressure to politicians, such as when tariffs were being set, and decisions being taken about public works; keeping members informed in writing, or by word of mouth, about markets and what commodities were around; putting unemployed members in contact with proprietors who needed manpower. The wealthier associations built their own meeting houses in the town centres, and participated with great pomp and ceremony in all the civic celebrations and grand occasions.

These institutions also tended to regulate the internal life of the craft, establishing rates and charges, salaries and codes of conduct. In Boston, for example, anyone who employed apprentices who were too young was liable to pay a fine of $10, whereas anyone who convinced an apprentice to abandon another workshop for his own had to stump up $30.

Initially the associations which lasted longest were the typographers’ and shoe makers’ societies. Other ones, although they didn’t last as long, seemed ever ready to re-emerge at the first opportunity. Their mortality was principally determined by the efforts of the bosses to have the members of these organisations condemned as ‘conspirators’, and by the preparedness of the courts to go along with them. The original scope of the craft societies was above all to maintain, rather than improve, wages and working conditions, keeping them at the point where they would still undercut other workers in order to safeguard their own members’ interests; clearly an aristocratic attitude, which would be slow to disappear from the American workers’ movement.

The revolution in the market which took place at the beginning of the 1800s – with many workshop proprietors becoming small entrepreneurs and an increase in the average number of people in each workshop, more in certain sectors than in others to begin with – also had repercussions on these associations, which would start to diversify, with some of them supporting the proprietor’s line and others, in their tone and composition, taking a more worker orientated line. Only the latter type would focus on the defence of wage levels and working conditions, rather than on upholding a generic solidarity. What is more, the former organisations began to put up their subscriptions to levels which the day labourers couldn’t afford. Above all, the workers began to realise that fellowship of the old type was no longer enough: preventing the proprietors from reducing them to poverty in the first place was as important as mutual support to deal with such poverty after the event, once the workers’ families had already been affected.

But even if this process, as always in such cases, differed from one trade to another, from one city to another and involved U-turns and brusque accelerations, the general outcome may be summed up in the experience of the New York Typographical Society. Whereas in 1809 it had approved a resolution which stated “ between employers and employed there are mutual interests”, eight years later it discovered that an employer member had been conspiring with other employers to break the union. After expelling him, the society amended their constitution and excluded employers because “Experience teaches us that the actions of men are influenced almost wholly by their interests, and that it is almost impossible that a society can be regulated and useful where its members are actuated by opposite motives and separate interests. This society is a society of journeymen printers, and as the interests of the journeymen are separate and in some respects opposite to that of the employers, we deem it improper that they should have any voice or influence in our deliberation. (…) That when any member of this society shall become an employing printer he should be considered without the limits of the Society and not to vote on any question, or pay any dues in the same.”

The craft regulations and customs were steadily eroded by the new economic environment and by the end of the 1820s we can say they were finally defunct.

Give the absence of the guilds and the relatively lack of apprentices, the first trade union organisations had an ‘aristocratic’ character, and were composed solely of skilled workers. They were merely temporary associations set up to achieve immediate ends: in 1778 the New York typographers joined together to demand a three dollar wage increase, and since their demands were met, they saw no reason to continue meeting. The first strike dates back to 1786, six years before the foundation of the first permanent trade union, and on that occasion the strikers, the Philadelphia typographers, also won. In the years that followed there were a number of other struggles, and the bourgeoisie was starting to get frightened. With the workers showing increasing determination and effectiveness the proprietors were not slow to respond, applying increasingly decisive strategies in proportion to the means at their disposal. To the workers it therefore soon became apparent that mounting a successful struggle required a permanent organisation, with regular meetings, a strike fund, and a plan of action to prepare for future battles.

The transition to a trade union structure was therefore fiercely opposed by the proprietors, who were often able to obtain court orders prohibiting union activity. But even if this approach was not formally repudiated until 1842, it never really prevented struggles from breaking out in any case, although it did put obstacles in their way and served as a means of carrying out vendettas against smaller, less well-organised proletarian organisations. As a matter of fact, new laws regarding the trade unions were never enacted. English Common Law was used instead, which defined conspiracy as when two or more people came together to damage the interests of a third, or that of the general public. After the first verdicts in the courts had been passed, these would then be used as precedents in subsequent cases. In order to control the working class, the republic, born out of a difficult and bloody struggle (fought above all by workers and peasants as we have seen) for liberty, equality and the “pursuit of happiness”, would casually appeal to a law which had been passed in hated England in 1349, the Statute of Labourers, which was enacted, in the interests of the employers, to force workers who had survived the Black Death to work for wages set by law.

But it is not until 1792 that we have what may be considered the first permanent trade union, the Philadelphia shoemakers’ organisation, which would battle on, against all the odds, until 1806. Their example was quickly followed by analogous initiatives in Boston, Philadelphia and Providence, and then by many others, to a degree, in every other city. Nevertheless, despite the advent of permanent trade unions, many organisations would disband after a strike, whether they were successful or not.

The two opposing classes meanwhile started to define themselves and clarify their respective identities from a theoretical point of view, with the rising bourgeoisie certainly much more prolific in this respect. Adam Smith was one of the principal sources of American bourgeois ideology during this period, an ideology which would eventually develop into the postulate of free labor, which even now, reduced to an empty illusion, gets between our feet today. The ideal society, supposedly, is one in which there is a minimum of political interference in the market and in production, the dynamics of which are supposed to naturally favour the attainment of economic independence on the part of the farmers and the workers, if, that is, they are sufficiently diligent and industrious. In short, it is the theory of ‘the self-made man’: everyone has the possibility of making money (how is irrelevant), after all, where there’s a will there’s a way… What is more, Free Labor is considered the founding ideology of the Republican Party, which would form as such in the mid 1850s.

Another important tendency was reformed Protestantism, which spread from the valleys of the North across the entire Union between 1790 and the 1850s. Evangelical fervour, which produced a plethora of sects which still infest the country today, claimed to exert a moralising influence, but of the sort that didn’t conflict with the ambitions of the nascent bourgeoisie, and with the requirement of efficiently run workshops.

It was phenomenon – which we won’t go into here – which had repercussions on the two national parties: the Whigs (predecessors of the Republicans) and the Democrats. Already the two parties displayed those marked differences which would characterise them in the years to come. The Whigs supported intervention from central government, to establish protective tariffs, construct infrastructures and create an efficient national banking system. Obviously they had the support of the financial and manufacturing bourgeoisie, and of the workers’ aristocracy, which welcomed the development of public education and welfare provision. The Democrats, on the other hand, detested federal intervention and were highly suspicious of it. They drew their support from the Southern planters, but were also supported by the commercial bourgeoisie of the North, by professionals, and by the poorest proletarians and immigrants. In response to the workers’ struggles of the 1830s they ended up making demands which were of interest to proletarians, such as the abolition of the militias and imprisonment for debt, but never demands that significantly favoured the working class, such as a reduction in working hours or a minimum wage.

On the contrary, both parties, when faced with the rise of the first trade unions, sought refuge in the theory of free labor, which translated into trade union terms meant every individual was equivalent to every other, bosses included. A theory, incidentally, which at the time had been welcomed with open arms by every country in Europe, and was being used to prohibit the trade unions by law. To the Whigs, the trade unions were ‘plunderers’, to the Democrats, they were ‘monopolists’ – as were the big entrepreneurs, true, but ‘much more dangerous’. The law of supply and demand, according to bourgeoisie theoreticians and politicians, set the level of wages and it was considered inviolable. The same went for the sacred doctrine of ‘freedom of contract’, which gave every man the right to work for as many hours a day ‘as he chose’. The transatlantic bourgeoisie, in considering workers united in trade unions as the type of association which wanted to bend the poor entrepreneur, alone against all, to its will, was no different from its European counterpart.

The Situation of the Working Class

The dream of the Journeyman, of the skilled worker, was to live a dignified, not needlessly extravagant, life, whose professional course ran from apprentice to artisan; a life crowned with the acquisition of a house for his family, by participation in professional and civic organisations, and with the setting aside of a sufficient sum to ensure a comfortable old age. But this not unreasonable objective was not always achievable; not through any lack of industriousness on the part of the worker, but because the economic scene was becoming ever more erratic with the development of the capitalist economy. At the beginning of the 1820s shoemakers and tailors were earning between $6.00 and $8.00 per week, that is, between $2.00 and $4.00 less than the typesetters, carpenters and other craftsmen in the so-called ‘respectable’ trades. The periodic recessions in the next thirty years, the worst of them in the 1830s, had the effect of lowering wages across the board. In the 1850s there was a revival: in 1860 average wages were a third higher than in 1850, and almost back to pre-crisis levels. But there had been created a major differentiation between the different sectors, and wide wage differentials.

In the cities of the Midwest, which were developing at an unusual pace thanks to the lack of labour power keeping wages high, things were better, at least to begin with. In 1820, almost a third of the workers in Cincinnati owned their own homes, possibly the highest percentage in the country. But by 1838 the situation had changed, and the rate had fallen to 6%, falling to 5% by 1850. In the same period the wealth of the highest strata of the population went up from 70% in 1838 to 80% in 1860.

Other data also gives us an idea of the state of the working class at this historic juncture: at the beginning of the period an average family needed around $330 per annum to avoid poverty, a sum that only unskilled workers lacking work for long periods found difficult to scrape together. Thirty years later, the required sum had risen to $500 ($600 in New York), whilst wages, in the best of cases, remained unchanged. The proletarian masses in the cities were struggling to survive; very different from the dignified life to which the journeymen had aspired!

Outside the big cities, and sometimes in them, those who were able to kept a vegetable plot, hunted or fished. Others raised pigs or even cattle if possible. If they had a spare room they rented it out to a single worker, although extremely cramped conditions were the norm in the big cities. In such circumstances it was therefore not surprising that every resource was exploited, including the labour of children and adolescents; labour which, like domestic labour, was very poorly remunerated, but added to other income could make the difference between pauperism and a dignified poverty.

In the South the situation of white proletarians was invariably worse. But at the bottom of the social scale, living and working in the worst conditions of all, were the free black workers. For they, as well as having to put up with the usual exploitation by the bourgeoisie, were ostracised by white workers, who thought forcing black workers out of the productive process was the best way of getting more work for themselves. Often the workers and the proprietors in the skilled trades used their organisations to promote legislation which eliminated black competition, forcing blacks into ever more unpleasant jobs, even when they had a trade and work experience. But once having being forced into unskilled and usually temporary work, as dock hands or builder’s labourer, they still wouldn’t be left in peace: first white workers, who had lost their jobs during the depression at the beginning of the 1840s, then starving immigrants, who flocked into the cities a few years later, would spark off racially motivated revolts and engage in various forms of intimidation in the cities of both North and South. For instance, bitter struggles would take place in Philadelphia in 1841 and 1849, when even the contractors would be intimidated by the mob, composed mainly of Irishmen, until blacks were more or less banned from working in the docks. The same occurred in the South: in New Orleans the Irish would arrive and replace black people in one of their most traditional occupations, as restaurant waiters.

The free black population certainly didn’t always suffer in silence, but their counter-offensives were nevertheless bound to fail: as opposed to slaves, who could count on the influence and protection of their owner, there was little they could expect from their employers. In the 1850s, thanks to the economic boom and to the antagonism which was building up between the North and the South, the situation slightly improved in the North, and blacks would begin to reappear in the ports and on the building sites, but the majority would still remained stuck in the most menial occupations; a situation which, a century and a half later, hasn’t really changed that much, although the only laws governing it now are the ineradicable laws of capitalist economy.