Labor History Links

An unknown photographer captured this scene of men, women, and children picking cotton under the watchful eye of an overseer. Slaves on cotton plantations worked under harsh conditions. The working day began at dawn and often lasted well into the night. Work was done in gangs, where discipline and the unrelenting pace of work was enforced by a driver or overseer. Whipping was regularly used to enforce picking quotas or increase the pace of work. In what little time they had besides what they spent working for the master, slaves had to do all the chores of daily life: they prepared their own meals, washed and fed their children, cleaned their cabins, washed and mended their clothes, and, if they were especially fortunate, tended their own vegetable gardens.

The annual convention of the Knights of Labor that convened in Richmond, Virginia, on October 4, 1886, took place in a region riven by racial and political conflict. The convention and the Knights, the most powerful labor organization in late 19th century America, were quickly plunged into conflict over the organization’s attitudes toward the question of social equality between the races. A major controversy erupted over whether or not Frank J. Ferrell, a black representative of the Knights’ powerful District Assembly #49 in New York City, should introduce the governor of Virginia at the opening session. This excerpt from Knights’ leader General Master Workman Terence V. Powderly’s 1890 autobiography detailed the tense moments leading up to Frank Ferrell’s appearance at the podium, where he agreed to introduce Powderly and the Grand Master Workman in turn would introduce the governor.

Source: Terence V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 1859–1889 (Philadelphia: T. V. Powderly, 1890).

The September 18, 1762 edition of the South Carolina Gazette included notices of stray animals, runaway wives, and escaped slaves. Along with breaking tools, feigning illness, and slowing work, running away, individually or in groups, was a common form of resistance to slavery. Most of those who ran away did so for short periods, often to visit spouses or relatives on other farms, or to escape punishment. Chances were slim for permanent escape, and most of those who ran away were eventually reenslaved. Still, some escaped slaves found refuge with Native American groups or in small, isolated maroon colonies.

A planter distributed provisions in an illustration from a weekly newspaper report on the operations of a plantation around 1860. The engraving suggested that this planter provided his enslaved workers with a varied and nutritious diet, which was not typically the case. It failed to show the gardens and other methods people living in bondage used to supplement often meager or boring fare.

Like many other industries, shoe manufacturing changed in the early 19th century. Previously, most shoemakers worked in their homes or small workshops (called “ten-footers”), where they took part in each stage of production. With the turn of the century, spurred by the increasing demand for cheap shoes, entrepreneurs established factories based on a greater division of labor. Production was divided into a number of stages that could each be completed by less-skilled workers. Those who owned larger shops prospered, while many skilled workers suffered as they were forced to become wage workers. By the time this engraving of a master and journeymen making shoes in a workshop attached to the master's home was published in 1880, the shoemaker's “ten-footer” was only a memory.

To supply labor for the plantation economies of the Americas, Europeans forcibly removed roughly 12 million people from Africa between the 15th and the 19th centuries. These men, women, and children were marched from their homes to the coast and placed on “slavers” like the one pictured in this diagram from an 1808 report on the African slave trade. Designed to carry the largest number of people in the smallest possible space, these ships provided an indescribably horrible experience for the humans chained below decks. Roughly one in six slaves died at sea from disease, malnutrition, and suicide.

Source: Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808)—American Social History Project.

In this activity, students work in small groups to read primary documents that reflect a variety of viewpoints on the 1834 and 1836 labor strikes by young female factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts. They then plan and act out a five to seven minute “talk show” airing the issues raised by their reading of the historical sources. Designed for high school students, this activity can be supplemented by (but does not require) students viewing the 30-minute American Social History Project documentary Daughters of Free Men.

A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women’s suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836.

In 1898 the United States acquired Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island 1,000 miles southeast of Miami, after victory in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. After an initial military occupation, the United States granted Puerto Rico limited local autonomy. In 1917, the U.S. responded to local pressure for independence by declaring Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States—a “gift” that many Puerto Ricans resented. Large, corporate-financed sugar plantations transformed Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy and displaced thousands of subsistence farmers from their own land, forcing them into the rural wage labor force. These dramatic changes in the rural economy in the years before World War I pushed unemployment levels in Puerto Rico to crisis proportions. At the same time, American entry into the war created labor shortages in many industries on the mainland. This Labor Department bulletin from May 1918 set out plans for bringing more than 10,000 Puerto Rican laborers to the U.S. to work on war-related projects.

Beginning in the late 1870s, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded a vision of a “New South” with a modern, industrial economic system. The defeat of the Confederacy, the abolition of racial slavery, and the demise of the plantation economy provided the South with opportunities to build factories and turn its raw materials into finished products: cotton into cloth, tobacco into cigarettes, coal and iron ore into steel. But mill workers, small farmers, and agricultural tenants and sharecroppers in the “New South” suffered decades of long hours, low pay, unsafe working conditions, and deplorable living situations.

These anonymous comments made by cotton mill hands and farmers in 1887 and 1889 to agents of the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics challenged the arguments of the “New South” boosters and illustrated the grim price workers paid for the region’s embrace of the much-touted new industrial order.

On George Washington’s birthday, 1860, the largest industrial strike to date in the United States started in Lynn, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston. The efforts of the Lynn strikers encouraged shoe and textile workers—including many women—in the nearby town of Marblehead. In Marblehead, as in Lynn, workers invoked the republican values of the American revolution to press their cause. Carrying banners proclaiming “we are not slaves,” they referred both to the rhetorical slavery employed by revolutionary leaders and to the real slave system that would collapse in the imminent Civil War. The New York Times reporter who wrote this article, however, was less interested in the historical resonance of the events he witnessed than he was in the loss of revenue to Lynn merchants, the novelty of women gathering in public, and having a good time with his Boston colleagues.

In the decades following the Confederacy’s 1865 defeat and the abolition of racial slavery, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded the coming of a “New South” economic order. Freed from the plantation system, the South would enter the modern age, building factories to turn its cotton into cloth, its tobacco crop into finished cigars and cigarettes, and its growing coal and iron ore output into steel. But not all southerners benefited from a prosperous and industrialized New South. Mill workers, small farmers, and tenants and sharecroppers bore the brunt of the sacrifices required to build a new southern economy. These extracts from letters by tenants and farm laborers to the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1887 and 1889 described the depressed crop prices, usurious interest rates charged by landowners for seed and equipment, and the absence of decent schooling for children faced by southern agricultural workers.

Since at least the 1830s, New York working women endured low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions. Concerned observers noted that some were even forced to turn to prostitution to supplement their meager incomes. During the Civil War, poor men flocked to the army (wealthier men could purchase substitutes for $300). The women left behind were now responsible for supporting families on their own. While wartime production created additional opportunities for women to work, it also led to even greater exploitation as factory owners pushed their workers to turn out more goods. Under these conditions, some women, such as this one, suggested that collective action might provide a solution.

The “Great Migration” of the second two decades of the 20th century (the teens and twenties) reshaped northern cities—roughly 70,000 southern blacks settled in Chicago alone. Many used the city only as a temporary destination, moving to other cities in the North and West. During these years New York’s black population grew from 91,709 to 152,467; Detroit’s from 5,741 to 40,878; and Philadelphia’s from 84,459 to 134,229. Northern newspapers, word of mouth, and letters sent home by earlier migrants all contributed to the anticipation black southerners felt about opportunities for a new life in the North. Once they had settled in northern cities, however, many newcomers responded more ambivalently to their new surroundings in the face of northern-style racism, cold weather, high prices, crime, and loneliness.Some African-American blues musicians used their songs to describe the migrants’ reactions to their new homes. Lizzie Miles’s “Cotton Belt Blues,” recorded in 1923, expressed yearning for a former southern home.

The author of this letter, who used the pseudonym “Dame Shirley,” was Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp (1819–1906). The letter was written to Clapp’s sister, Molly, in Massachusetts, but was subsequently published as one of a series of twenty-three in the Pioneer, a California literary magazine. Clapp’s subject in the “Shirley letters,” as they are called, was life at the gold mining camps of mid-19th-century California. Clapp knew about life in the world of California gold mining from first-hand experience. With her husband, a doctor, Clapp left the East Coast for California in 1849. At first the couple settled in San Francisco, but in 1851 they left for the Sierra Nevada mountains so that Dr. Clapp could regain his health in the mountain air. In the Sierra Nevadas, they spent more than a year at two gold mining camps, Rich Bar and Indian Bar, on the Feather River. As the self-conscious tone of these letters suggests, Clapp aspired to be a literary writer. As a woman, her perspective on life in the nearly all-male camps was unique. The letters allegedly provided material for Bret Harte’s stories. Today we can appreciate them for their historical value as observations of life during the California gold rush.

Mid-nineteenth century immigrants inhabited a social world far removed from that of native born, middle class Americans, one often marked by economic hardship. With no government relief and only limited private efforts, poor New Yorkers often searched everywhere for means to survive.

This engraving showed people scavenging on garbage barges, searching for coal, rags, and other discarded items that might be used or sold to junk dealers. The picture, according to a Harper's Weekly editor, showed how some people in New York were forced to “live upon the refuse of respectable folk.”

Source: Stanley Fox, Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1866—American Social History Project.

“Embryo Courtezans and Felons”: New York Police Chief George W. Matsell Describes the City’s Vagrant and Delinquent Children, 1849 In 1849, New York’s chief of police, George W. Matsell, chose to devote most of his semi-annual report to the problem of vagrant and delinquent children. By mid-century New York was crowded with immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Adult immigrants took jobs once occupied by child apprentices and, despite Matsell’s reference to the city’s public schools, schooling was not compulsory in New York State until 1874. The result was an excess of poor children on the streets earning money however they could, sometimes, Matsell suggests, in unsavory occupations. Matsell’s anxiety about the city’s street children cut two ways: he was concerned about the harm these children were doing to themselves, but he also worried that they would grow up to join a “dangerous class” of criminals that would terrorize the city. In these sentiments he was joined by Charles Loring Brace. In 1853 Brace formed the Children’s Aid Society that initiated the “orphan trains.” These trains transported poor children out of the city to farms in the west.

In 1840, Unitarian minister George Ripley wrote to the Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson in an (unsuccessful) effort to convince him to join, or at least invest in, his planned utopian community, Brook Farm. Founders of antebellum utopian communities attempted to withdraw from what they saw as the hypocrisies and excesses of partisan politics, the inequities inherent in marriage and factory work, the evils of the slave system, and the corruption of cities and to create, in small scale, a more perfect place. Brook Farm began operations in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Brook farmers lived and dined communally, and divided their time between farm work and artistic and scholarly pursuits. Although other utopian communities, such as Oneida in upstate New York, and Amana, in Iowa, achieved self-sufficiency, Brook Farm ultimately failed. The community never recovered from a devastating fire in 1846, and it closed its doors in 1847.

From the rocky soil of Vermont’s hill towns, many young men and women in the nineteenth century went looking for new opportunities. Often they made a series of moves between farm, factory, and city. Their leave-taking pitted the responsibilities of maintaining family farms against the new attractions of financial and social independence. Sally Rice, born in 1821 in Dover, Vermont, was typical. In 1838 she found work as a domestic servant in New York, not far over the border from her family’s hardscrabble farm, securing for herself much valued wages and independence. Several years later she worked as a weaver in one of the many cotton mills that lined the Blackstone Valley of central Massachusetts and Connecticut. Her letters home to her mother and father in Vermont carefully weighed issues of family and independence, farm and factory life.

Urban artisans experienced dramatic changes in the second quarter of the 19th century. New York and other cities were destinations of choice for many rural mechanics as well as those coming from overseas. Upon arrival they found workshops in great flux as traditional social relations among master, journeyman, and apprentice were being transformed into an employer-employee relationship. In some crafts, such as cabinetmaking, change came more slowly because of the complexities of fashioning large case furniture. In other trades, such as tailoring, tiny sweatshops started to dot the city streets. A new working class was coming into being, often with a variety of religions and backgrounds, and they organized to contest these and other changes in work conditions and compensation. This anonymous account from a British periodical in 1845 related the experience of a British cabinetmaker in New York in the 1830s; he eventually returned home.

While most working-class autobiographers followed the example of Benjamin Franklin and portrayed the “industrious apprentice,” William Otter showed another side of plebian life. Otter took his readers into the world of heavy drinking and nativist violence of antebellum urban life. Cities increasingly became unruly places to govern in the decades before the Civil War with their rapid population growth and jostling of immigrant and native born. Competition for jobs and just plain scapegoating led to brawls between native-born, foreign, and African-Americans workers. Otter participated in the urban diversions made possible by the new commercial culture such as boxing, baseball and other sports, or games at local taverns, along with the competitions between rival militia companies and neighborhood street gangs. All of these boisterous activities could turn violent. Otter was born in England and impressed into the British navy. He jumped ship and came to New York in 1831. While apprenticed as a plasterer, he entered a world of masculine culture that he colorfully displayed in his History of My Own Times (1835).

Farm households depended heavily on the work of women and children. At first children were assigned simple tasks; later they learned chores that were differentiated according to gender roles.

In the 1790s, young unmarried women such as Elizabeth Fuller pursued work in the dairy or in home manufacturing along with their housework and garden tasks. Fuller lived in the central Massachusetts town of Princeton; her diary recorded her health, social activities, and any unusual events in her life.

Mostly, she faced a regular round of household tasks such as making cheese or baking pies. She often washed, carded, and spun wool, since her most significant labor was the household textile production that provided most farm families with their clothing.

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city’s poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans—their rivals in the city’s labor market—for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York’s devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

The Knights of Labor, a nineteenth-century labor federation, employed elaborate rituals and symbols in their local assembly meetings. The initiation ceremony for new members, for example, relied heavily on religious imagery and language. It also drew on the rituals of other fraternal organizations like the Masons and the Odd Fellows, that had many working-class members. The ceremony emphasized that all that was valuable and worthy in society derived from human labor. New Knights agreed to commit themselves to improve the conditions of all working people. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the 1880s were “baptized” in a Knights of Labor initiation ceremony that required the following promises.
Source: Illustrated “Adelphon Kruptos”: The Secret Work of the Knights of Labor as quoted in Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 135.

Ragtime music, with its syncopated, polyrhythmic style, was born, according to cultural historian Robert Snyder, in the 1890s in the black saloons and brothels of southern and Midwestern cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. By the end of the 19th century ragtime had assumed a place at the center of American popular music and remained there until the 1920s. Ragtime meant a tinkling piano and no one played the ragtime piano any better or longer than Eubie Blake, born in Baltimore in 1887. In this selection from an interview performance conducted in 1970 for public television by musician Max Morath, Blake recalled how he began playing ragtime as a young man at the turn of the century.