As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum, it changed the nature of workers’ lives. Following the American Revolution, many craft workers espoused artisan republicanism, an ideology of production based on liberty and equality. They saw themselves as small-scale producers, equal to one another and free to work for themselves. The poet Walt Whitman summed up their outlook: “Men must be masters, under themselves.”

Free Workers Form Unions However, as the outwork and factory systems spread, more and more workers became wage earners who labored under the control of an employer. Unlike young women, who embraced factory work because it freed them from parental control and domestic service, men bridled at their status as supervised wageworkers. To assert their independent status, male wageworkers rejected the traditional terms of master and servant and used the Dutch word boss to refer to their employer. Likewise, lowly apprentices refused to allow masters to control their private (nonwork) lives and joined their mates in building a robust plebeian culture. Still, as hired hands, they received meager wages and had little job security. The artisan-republican ideal of “self-ownership” confronted the harsh reality of waged work in an industrializing capitalist society. Labor had become a commodity, to be bought and sold.

Some wage earners worked in carpentry, stonecutting, masonry, and cabinetmaking — traditional crafts that required specialized skills. Their strong sense of identity, or trade consciousness, enabled these workers to form unions and bargain with their master-artisan employers. They resented low wages and long hours, which restricted their family life and educational opportunities. In Boston, six hundred carpenters went on strike in 1825. That protest failed, but in 1840, craft workers in St. Louis secured a ten-hour day, and President Van Buren issued an executive order setting a similar workday for federal workers.

Artisans in other occupations were less successful in preserving their pay and working conditions. As aggressive entrepreneurs and machine technology took command, shoemakers, hatters, printers, furniture makers, and weavers faced the regimentation of low-paid factory work. In response, some artisans in these trades moved to small towns, while in New York City, 800 highly skilled cabinetmakers made fashionable furniture. In status and income, these cabinetmakers outranked a group of 3,200 semitrained, wage-earning workers — disparagingly called “botches” — who made cheaper tables and chairs in factories. Thus the new industrial system split the traditional artisan class into self-employed craftsmen and wage-earning workers.

When wage earners banded together to form unions, they faced a legal hurdle: English and American common law branded such groups as illegal “combinations.” As a Philadelphia judge put it, unions were “a government unto themselves” and unlawfully interfered with a “master’s” authority over his “servant.” Other lawsuits accused unions of “conspiring” to raise wages and thereby injure employers. “It is important to the best interests of society that the price of labor be left to regulate itself,” the New York Supreme Court declared in 1835, while excluding employers from this rule. Clothing manufacturers in New York City collectively agreed to set wage rates and to dismiss members of the Society of Journeymen Tailors.

Labor Ideology Despite such obstacles, during the 1830s journeymen shoemakers founded mutual benefit societies in Lynn, Massachusetts, and other shoemaking centers. As the workers explained, “The capitalist has no other interest in us, than to get as much labor out of us as possible. We are hired men, and hired men, like hired horses, have no souls.” To exert more pressure on their employers, in 1834 local unions from Boston to Philadelphia formed the National Trades Union, the first regional union of different trades.

Workers found considerable popular support for their cause. When a New York City court upheld a conspiracy verdict against their union, tailors warned that the “Freemen of the North are now on a level with the slaves of the South,” and organized a mass meeting of 27,000 people to denounce the decision. In 1836, local juries hearing conspiracy cases acquitted shoemakers in Hudson, New York; carpet makers in Thompsonville, Connecticut; and plasterers in Philadelphia. Even when juries convicted workers, judges imposed only light fines, so labor organizers were not deterred. Then, in Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned common-law precedents and upheld the right of workers to form unions and call strikes to enforce closed-shop agreements that limited employment to union members. But many judges continued to resist unions by issuing injunctions forbidding strikes.

Union leaders expanded artisan republicanism to include wageworkers. Arguing that wage earners were becoming “slaves to a monied aristocracy,” they condemned the new factory system in which “capital and labor stand opposed.” To create a just society in which workers could “live as comfortably as others,” they advanced a labor theory of value. Under this theory, the price of goods should reflect the labor required to make them, and the income from their sale should go primarily to the producers, not to factory owners, middlemen, or storekeepers. “The poor who perform the work, ought to receive at least half of that sum which is charged” to the consumer, declared minister Ezra Stiles Ely. Union activists agreed, organizing nearly fifty strikes for higher wages in 1836. Appealing to the spirit of the American Revolution, which had destroyed the aristocracy of birth, they called for a new revolution to demolish the aristocracy of capital.

Women textile operatives were equally active. Competition in the woolen and cotton textile industries was fierce because mechanization caused output to grow faster than consumer demand. As textile prices fell, manufacturers’ revenues declined. To maintain profits, employers reduced workers’ wages and imposed tougher work rules. In 1828 and again in 1834, women mill workers in Dover, New Hampshire, went on strike and won some relief. In Lowell, two thousand women operatives backed a strike by withdrawing their savings from an employer-owned bank. “One of the leaders mounted a pump,” the Boston Transcript reported, “and made a flaming … speech on the rights of women and the iniquities of the ‘monied aristocracy.’” Increasingly, young New England women refused to enter the mills, and impoverished Irish (and later French Canadian) immigrants took their places.

In 1857, the new economic system faltered, as overproduction and a financial panic sparked by the bankruptcies of several railroads pushed the economy into a recession. Urban unemployment soared to 10 percent and reminded Americans of the social costs of industrial production.