The Labor Movement in the United States of America – Part 6

Fresh Immigration and the Slavery Crisis: The “Negroes who vote”

The Irish, who started to arrive in big numbers in the years after 1846 to escape the Great Famine, first tended to group together in ethnic and Catholic associations rather than in class-based organizations. In future they would swell the ranks of the unions with honor, but until the Civil War they were more interested in simply finding a job than in struggling to improve their conditions. However, the Irish always remained tied to those organizations that had been created by their compatriots who had arrived in America in the preceding decades.

Just as the Protestant Americans, including workers, formed the basis for the development of the Republican Party, so the Irishman was already on the side of the Democratic Party. The division was also an issue for public schools, where the teachers warned against the Papist conspiracy and described the Irish as uncouth. In 1844 there was a violent confrontation between Protestants and Irish immigrants in Philadelphia, with 16 deaths; the city, which had seen the workers themselves fighting side by side just seven years earlier in the General Trades Union (GTU), now burned with sectarian hatred. This was a situation that set the movement back a generation, and which made fraternization between proletarians impossible. The new organizations were also easily redirected towards hatred of immigrants, who were accused of driving down wages. Orators were heard who even defined the trade unions as superfluous and the cause of divisions, incapable of reforming society compared to the potential of nativist politics.

It seems paradoxical that this period of working class history has been defined in the USA as the era of “humanitarianism”. The explanation arises from the fact that, in a moment in which the workers were divided by ethnic differences, in which factory production was being revolutionized by the introduction of machines, in which most work was being carried out by women and children, the recovery of a genuine class movement was difficult and thus there was plenty of scope for solutions proposed by bourgeois reformists. We have seen how nativism took hold of the local proletarians.

The National Reform Association took advantage of the return of trade unionism between the end of the 40s and the start of the 50s. This rebirth can be ascribed to two different groups of proletarians. One consisted of German emigrants, many refugees following the revolutions of 1848, who united with their compatriots of earlier generations; they were not, however, similar to them in mentality, being far more radical and internationalist, and they created societies of free thinkers and a lively and nonconformist press. Initially, they expended much energy on sustaining the revolutionaries who returned to their country to struggle against monarchy.

The Germans were the most advanced layer within the class, and remained as such for a while. The typical German emigrant was a highly specialized artisan, who hoped to live better in the new world, exploiting his trade. Thus it was not long before shoemakers, tailors, typographers and other categories of workers formed craft trade unions which then came together in similar confederations to the civic societies that existed in the 1830s.

In many cities he German workers accounted for the most active part of the working class movements. From the start, they were inspired by communist doctrine whether that of Marx and Engels or that of (from 1846) that of Weitling, who visited the country several times and who founded a workers’ newspaper and organizations there. But Weitling did not truly believe in trade union struggle, which he utilized only in order to unite workers behind his cooperativist projects and in general behind a utopian communism, which after a short while alienated the following it first attracted. In 1851 Joseph Weydemeyer, a revolutionary communist friend of Marx and Engels, arrived in America, entering into polemics with Weitling, and demonstrating that “revolutionary cooperativism” only served to divide the workers, besides being a mere utopia. The most important thing on the immediate agenda for the working class movement was the struggle to defend day-to-day needs; but the political struggle was equally important. Economic and political reform was needed; but to achieve these objectives the first requirement was the class’s organization and unity. Therefore, enough of organizations comprising only Germans.

In 1853 a mass meeting was called in New York. The address proclaimed: “Only if all the trades are united and agitate in unity behind a common plan will it be possible to overcome all of the many causes that bring workers down to the level of beasts of burdens. Forwards, for a broad association of workers, not just to struggle for higher salaries and political reform, but also for the creation of a platform capable of uniting all proletarians for the good of the working class. All workers must take part in the meeting. Rise up like a single man. All for one, one for all”.

The meeting, which took place on March 21, 1853, and in which around 800 German workers took part, founded the Amerikanischer Arbeiterbund [American Workers’ Federation]. The union, which set an example for joining forces, was open to all trade unions, of whatever origin, trade, particular characteristic, and also to individual workers, without limitation according to nationality, belief or specialization, because they recognized that the scope of the union was to defend workers’ conditions by all means against the attacks of the bosses, who were also ready to use all means necessary. In addition, the Federation proclaimed its organizational independence of all existing political parties.

The example was followed in the same year by English-speaking workers. But the initiative was short-lived, and the ALU did not last much longer. The problem was that the craft-based unions in general were not interested in the other workers, and only went into action when their own sectional interests were in danger. Weydemeyer, who obviously also participated in the New York-based Communist Club, managed to keep the ALU alive until 1860; but the times were not yet mature. Nevertheless, the initiative had the merit of approaching the workers from earlier waves of immigration to that of the recently arrived Germans, a resource which proved fundamental for the trade union and political growth of the workers’ movement in North America.

The other group of unionized workers was the artisans. For these, wages were not the primary issue: wages at the end of 1840s had risen for more specialized workers. But working conditions continued to deteriorate, to the point that many missed the passing of the master craftsmen of earlier times, who respected the conventions of the craft, and did not hire people lacking skill and affiliation. If on the one hand this attitude included an element of racism, given that the non-specialized were mainly Irish (“Negroes who vote”, they were called in the South), the result in reality was the definitive break with inter-classist mutual aid associations, and the formation of pure workers’ unions, even if for the time being women, Negroes and non-specialists were excluded.

The latter, being left out of trade unions, deprived of any class consciousness and in general too poor to have qualms, often constituted the gangs of scabs whom the bosses used to break strikes. On August 4, 1850 at New York, there was a confrontation between police and scabs, and two workers lay dead in the tumult, the first victims of working disputes in America.

The American Party

The strong wave of immigration also had the effect of giving rebirth to the anti-Catholic sentiment of the native workers. A xenophobic movement was born from this tendency, The American Party, called the “Know Nothings”, which gradually asserted itself in these years, and which in 1854 scored major successes in local administrative elections. But, aside from predictable measures against the immigrants, the movement also had an agenda that was of interest for the workers, similar to that of the Working Men in the 1830s: abolition of debtors’ prisons, extension of public education, prohibition of the employment of children under 15 years of age who did not attend school for at least 11 weeks per year, etc. The movement later proved to be an intermediate stage that would lead the workers to support, a little later, the anti-slavery crusade of the Republican Party. This repositioning was due to the widespread fear among the workers that the planters in the South, with their millions of slaves and the intention to extend slavery to the new territories in the West, constituted an even greater menace to their own living conditions than that presented by the immigrants. This tendency, and the movement for “Free Soil”, hugely popular in the Midwest, formed the backbone of popular support for the Republican Party before (with Lincoln’s victory) and during the war.

The Homestead Act, which drew on the same grassroots movements as the National Reform Association, was one of the warhorses of the Republicans, even if they were far from constituting that brake on capitalism which George Henry Evans believed would take place.

The workers’ movement held out through the highs and lows for the rest of the 1850s. National and central associations arose, which were however hard hit by the depressions of 1854 and 1857. The first was the National Typographical Union (1852), followed in the same year by the national union of glassblowers and then, in 1851 and 1854, the cigar-makers. 1854 saw the turn of the hat makers, who collaborated closely with their European comrades, above all with the English, as was the case with the calico printers. In 1855 railway workers and train drivers organized themselves, in 1853-56 the shipyard workers who had formed strong union sections in California; in 1850 and 1858 spinners, in 1856 decorators, in 1858 blast furnace workers (Sons of Vulcan), in 1857 miners, in 1859 mechanics and blacksmiths, whose national union was recognized by Congress. In the same year ironworkers organized themselves, also forming production cooperatives in various localities. It is estimated that by 1860 there were 26 national trade unions in the USA.

On the other hand a good two million foreigners disembarked in search of work in this decade alone, an enormous figure compared with the existing population; leading them to occupy positions that were opened up despite the crises by increasing mechanization and division of labor, which demanded less and less professional development. In 1860, in the large cities of the North, a third of the typographers, half of those in the construction industry, and nearly three quarters of shoemakers, tailors and carpenters were born abroad. In the face of this avalanche of unskilled labor, more conscious of their own origins than the class to which they belonged, even the Irish started to rise to the level of semi-specialized activities.

The Situation Down South

South of the Mason-Dixon Line, which, by separating Pennsylvania from Maryland, was viewed as the border between North and South, the situation was very different, in that trade unionism remained at a minimal level until the end of the Civil War. The reason for this was that the working class was almost non-existent, because there was scarcely any industrial production, and the class was concentrated only in small firms, little more than artisanal, in commerce, in the ports, and in very rare cases within industries in some of the larger cities, such as the Tredagar iron works in Richmond. After all, there were no really big cities; the economic and cultural spirit of the South was in the countryside, vast flatlands alternating with extensive wild or wooded areas, where millions of slaves produced the wealth that allowed a few thousand families to live in the lap of luxury.

We have already described the rise of slavery in North America in the first part of this work, and we have also touched upon the differences between slave labor and waged labor from the Marxist economic point of view in a previous work (Capitalist development and the American Civil War, in Communist Left n. 21-22, 2005/6). However it is worth recalling a few aspects of this social situation and the production in the Southern States in order to understand the differences that manifested themselves also in the class struggle.

In the South, agrarian production was dominant. The products included all those of traditional agriculture, but in these times the primary and fundamental materials for sustenance were, for various reasons, mainly produced locally; above all around half way through the century it was the Midwest that became the principal supplier of meat and grain to the States of New England, whose population was growing rapidly. The wealth of the South, therefore, did not derive so much from conventional agrarian foodstuffs but from high value products which, by their nature, lent themselves to export: sugar cane, tobacco, rice and, above all cotton, “King Cotton” which, thanks to the invention of the cotton gin (which made human labor extremely productive) soon spread across virtually all of the Southern States from the end of the eighteenth century. It was precisely in these decades that the number of slaves tripled, and the phenomenon was certainly not stopped by the prohibition on the importation of slaves in 1808. The South’s prosperity in the 1850s exceeded that of anywhere else on Earth, and the profits were such as to warrant cultivating cotton on any available plot of land, however tiny, putting self-sufficiency in foodstuffs in danger.

Cotton was produced on plantations that employed huge numbers of slaves, who labored under the direction of supervisors; the latter, in general very well paid, were tasked with achieving their assigned production quotas, whatever the cost, and to this end did not save the slaves any kind of abuse. The lash was the instrument most used to convince the slaves to adapt to the wishes of the supervisor, and not infrequently slaves died from mistreatment. The owner did not complain, so long as the quotas were achieved. Certainly, the slave was an expensive item of fixed capital, but not one to be regretted if, having produced for many years, the cost had been amortized (as the owner would put it). They tended to save as much as possible on maintaining the slaves: in 1822 the annual cost of a slave, all included (food, clothing, safekeeping etc.) was less than 10% of the wages of a white worker paid at the minimum level necessary for survival. In 1856 a traveler observed that the diet of a working slave was worse, quantitatively and qualitatively, than that of a prison convict.

Many slaves accepted this oppression, resigned to a condition that the masters’ own religion, which the slaves themselves had embraced, held as being decided by the mysterious designs of God. But the majority of slaves struggled over two centuries by all means imaginable to win back their freedom, that very freedom which, in its hypocrisy, the dominant class boasted (and boasts) about at every turn. Of course, this was not a struggle that could take the form of a trade union struggle, but the resistance that these human beings conducted to shake off the (not metaphorical) chains was no less hard and determined than that of white proletarians, even if surely more desperate. We would commit a historical injustice if we did not refer, in addition to what we have reported elsewhere, to the individual and collective acts of these our unfortunate comrades, who often struggled more for mere survival than for better working conditions.

Responses to the system could be individual or collective. The slave who attacked the supervisor, killed or wounded him, and who made his escape, was not rare. Often, rather than fleeing into the woods with the certainty of being captured (usually they did not have any knowledge of the surrounding environment), he committed suicide. Many cases are reported of parents who committed suicide after killing their children in their sleep to spare them the hell of slavery.

Another form of struggle, closer to that of trade union struggle, consisted in collective refusal to work as a protest against whipping and other brutal punishments. Typically the slaves fled into the woods or swamps, letting the owners know that they would only return on condition that injustices done would be remedied, obviously without reprisals. But it is difficult to renounce freedom once it has been experienced: sometimes the slaves did not come back and, in the areas suitably distant from inhabited centers and difficult to discover, they created small communities. Or else they fled northwards; tens of thousands of slaves undertook the dangerous journey of thousands of kilometers towards the States in which slavery was no longer legal. It was an extremely arduous journey, in that it was only possible to move by night, in unknown territory, through forests and swamps, eating roots and berries and with dozens of rivers to cross by night. In this venture they were assisted in the last years before the war by the so-called “Underground Railroad”, a network of a large number of pathways which led from the border States of the South to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and from there to Canada, the only place in which the slaves felt genuinely safe from the expeditions of the bosses’ emissaries, who were sent to take them back.

The fugitive slaves who remained in communities in the South often organized expeditions against the plantations, liberated other slaves and supported revolts. At least 250 revolts of more than 10 slaves are recorded in the two centuries of the history of slavery in America, but it is a figure that is certainly below reality. Southern society was organized in a paramilitary fashion because of the need to control the Negroes with force of arms. The owners of slaves never felt safe, above all after the revolts in Santo Domingo, which had led to the establishment of an independent Negro republic, Haiti. A few strikes in the pre-war period were organized as slave insurrections. Among the most famous and effective was that of Vesey, a free slave who organized thousands of slaves for an insurrection that should have started in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, and which was crushed at the start by the treason of a few. The conspirators distinguished themselves by their dedication and heroism, which surprised their own oppressors. The largest revolt, over which the planters lost sleep for decades, was that of Nat Turner, who led an uprising of the Negroes of the plantations in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831; the revolt was only annihilated thanks to the combined intervention of the State militia and Federal troops, even though the rebels only had hand-weapons available.

The consequence of these events was on the one hand an upsurge in laws passed on slavery (for example, teaching them to read and write was prohibited), against supporting runaway slaves, and restrictions on the emancipation and rights of freed Negroes. But limitations on exploitation were also enacted, imposing a maximum of 15 hours on the working day in summer, and 14 in winter. Even though these seem inhuman working hours, the slave-owners continued to ignore them.

Things were not much better for the white population that did not own slaves. It is calculated that there were half a million slave-owners, even if only a thousand were truly wealthy; if you add in their families, the slave-owners amounted to about three million, while the white population was a good nine million. Therefore, two-thirds of the white population did not draw any benefit from slavery; on the contrary, they were in some respects oppressed. In fact, the slaves were so cheap that landowners did not consider hiring whites, who had greater needs, while there was little room for the other trades given the level of development of southern society. Even where there was a definite need for specialized labor (above all in the 1850s) slaves were ever more often used (“leased out”) and trained in the required skills. German immigrants who arrived in the South, in particular skilled artisans, soon left because of the competition from slaves or the low wages that were on offer.

Not that the use of slaves as workers was advantageous: in passing from the field to the factory the slaves did not succeed in acquiring sufficient specialist skills. They could be bought, but now the rigidity of fixed capital became, in many cases, unsustainable. Forced labor has never been as productive as “free” labor. Sooner, rather than later, the South would certainly have had to confront the choice of liberating some of the slaves and favoring immigration, or else renouncing industrial development.

How did the propertyless whites fare? The majority of the six million who did not own slaves lived in conditions of destitution, farming tiny plots of land at the margins of the large estates, land that was by now used up by industrial farming; they were regarded as the poor whites. Even those few who lived on waged labor were on the breadline, earning between 50 and 70% of the pay that could be earned for the same work in the North.

The weakness of trade unionism among these workers is therefore no surprise. Workers at the Tredagar iron works were again brought to trial and convicted for a strike in 1847. Unfortunately, then, most trade union activity by the workers in the South was directed at preventing the employment of slaves in specialist trades, in particular metalwork. But the same logic of excluding the slaves led the workers, gradually, to understand that the definitive solution would actually have been the abolition of the “peculiar institution” itself: the start of the 1850s saw the drawing together of an alliance between workers and slaves, an alliance which, by also winning the support of the few but strongly abolitionist colonies of German immigrants, began to preoccupy the lords of the slave-holding estates.

Towards the end of the 1850s therefore, the narrow southern oligarchy risked soon being confronted with a class war, a preoccupation that is evident from the local press of the time. The dilemma, as seen above, was serious. Keeping the slaves outside of the factory would have meant the rise of a free working class, by nature hostile to the planters. Allowing the slaves to work as industrial laborers would have weakened the slave system, because experience showed that the slaves employed in industry soon became agitators for emancipation, apart from which there was a growing understanding that, on balance, slave labor was not a cost-effective option. The choice that was taken was therefore to impede the South’s industrial growth by all means available; a myopic choice, which gave the planters a little breathing space, but which would be paid at a high price in the course of the war.

It was observed that “each free worker who goes south is another nail in the coffin of slavery”.

The Northern Working Class and Slavery

The attitude of the working class of the Northern States to the institution of slavery, which held four million human beings in shameful material and spiritual conditions, was not always straightforward and coherent. In principle, no-one in the workers’ movement disputed the fact that slavery was a disgraceful institution, which among other things contradicted the principles of the bourgeois revolution, and in particular the Declaration of Independence of 1776. A document produced by the trade unions of Massachusetts in 1830 hoped that “the infamous stain of slavery, which mars the good reputation of the country, will be erased; and that our comrades are not only declared free and equal, but are also able to enjoy that freedom and equality to which they are entitled by nature”. At this time the northern bourgeoisie was no longer “enlightened” and abolitionist, but for the most part undertook lucrative business with the southern planters, whether selling manufactured goods, dealing in cotton and other products, or directly supplying them with slaves, even if by now only as contraband. It was the so-called alliance between the “Lords of the Loom and the Lords of the Lash”.

Here and there spontaneous initiatives were taken, such as the Female Anti-Slavery Society of the workers in Lowell, MA, in 1832. In 1836, the Working Man’s Association of England, close to the Chartist movement, directed an appeal to American workers because it was engaged in a campaign against slavery. Examples which did not have the hoped-for consequences.

Traditionally the workers were tied to the Democratic Party, which was, among other things, in favor of accepting immigrants, contrary to the more conservative Whigs. Alignments on contrary positions could bring about a split in the party. Another cause of hesitation was fear, obviously fomented by the democratic press of the North, that a sudden emancipation would have caused an influx of millions of freed slaves onto the labor market, which would have driven down the price of wage labor. It was an argument that took hold on the least qualified layers of manual labor, in those years the Irish; also because their own Catholic church did not hesitate to fight against the abolitionists, as disciples of a tendency presented as an “English import”.

On the other hand in these first years the abolitionists were little concerned with the workers, while for their part the trade unions did not give much attention to the question, not to say tended to ignore it. Moreover, many workers believed that there was no great difference between the slavery of the lash and the slavery of need and misery. The disciples of the National Reform and Evans himself invited workers to forget about the slaves and struggle for Reform, which would have, once achieved, resolved all the problems. But a meeting of the New England Workingmen’s Association in 1846 disowned this, and reflected that “slavery must be eradicated in America before the working class will obtain the hoped for improvements”. Their position was the one that would be expressed by Marx several years later in “Capital”: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin”.

These were positions that were going to become more widespread within the economic and political organizations of the proletariat, but which struggled to penetrate the broad masses of workers, at least until midway through the 1850s.

As we have seen, there was a certain resistance on the part of the workers to abandoning the Democratic Party. But on the other hand the Democratic Party was increasingly becoming the party of the slave owners, and therefore increasingly a party of the South. In order to maintain their political power the slave owners had to extend slavery to the new territories, to avoid becoming the minority in Washington; this resulted in the aggressive politics in the West, above all at the expense of Mexico. Other political victories were the repeal of the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Dred Scott Decision (1857). The former resulted in a rush of thousands of pro-slavery Missourians into the newly created territory of Kansas, determined to tilt the fine constitutional balance in favor of the pro-slavery South. In response, northern abolitionists sent free soilers, leading to prolonged violence (“Bleeding Kansas”).

In their paranoia, justified by the inevitable and necessary decline of their own laws of capital, the slave owners came to idealize slavery as the ultimate form of American society, to be introduced also in the North; something that could not fail to increase the number of proletarians who joined the ranks of the abolitionist movement. Moreover it began to occur to the workers that, given that the slaves in the South were starting to enter skilled trades (which, as we have seen, was not a great success, but at the time this was not evident), their wages would be recalculated based on the cost of the labor of a Negro slave.

The Republican Party was born in 1854 in Wisconsin, through the work of leading lights of the trade union movement. Among their distinctive positions were opposition to the extension of slavery and support for the free soilers; with respect to the Whigs, they presented themselves as much more progressive and close the working class, but also made a favorable impression on the growing frontier population. Moreover, maintaining the Whig position on protectionism and the central bank, the party soon attracted the interest of the northern industrial and financial bourgeoisie. The defense of protectionism, and therefore of high tariffs on imports, obviously meaning European manufactured goods, was definitely favorably regarded by the manufacturing bourgeoisie of New England; but it was also an old warhorse of the Whigs, which the Republicans took up in order to win the workers over to their side. They put forward the idea that duties were primarily designed to protect American workers against the competition of cheap foreign labor. If they were not used to increase the prices of foreign manufactured goods before they reached the American market (or so they argued), the American industrialists would have no choice but to drive down wages to European levels in order to beat off the competition. The Republican politicians therefore had the bare-faced cheek to present themselves as defenders of the rights of workers, while actually defending the interests of big industry.

At first the bourgeoisie was slow to align itself, and some sectors, especially mercantile, remained loyal to the Democratic Party and the South. Drawing in sections from the decomposing Whigs, the part of the Democratic Party that represented the pioneers and small farmers, together with a good section of the industrial proletariat, the Republican Party rapidly gained strength, and achieved a great result in the presidential elections of 1856, even if it was not victorious. Prominent among its supporters in the proletarian camp were immigrants, especially workers of German and Scandinavian origin, who largely resented the influence of Weydemeyer and his Communist Club. In the successive years these same elements grew stronger, and in 1860 the Republican Party, supported by a bourgeoisie that increasingly understood that slavery was an obstacle to the country’s capitalist development, presented itself in the elections as the party of free labor; its champion was Abraham Lincoln, the “son of workers”. Nevertheless, it was above all the split in the Democratic Party into two major sections, one pro-slavery and one representing the farmers of the West, which delivered victory in the presidential elections to the Republicans.