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A Reformers' Union: Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860

Sean G. Griffin The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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A REFORMER’S UNION: , LABOR, AND THE EVOLUTION OF ANTISLAVERY POLITICS, 1790–1860

by

SEAN GRIFFIN

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2017

© 2017

SEAN GRIFFIN

All Reserved

ii

A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860

by

Sean Griffin

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

___12/9/2016______James Oakes______Date Chair of Examining Committee

___12/9/2016______Helena Rosenblatt______Date Executive Officer

Supervisory Committee:

Joshua Brown

David Waldstreicher

Manisha Sinha

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

iii

ABSTRACT

A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790–1860

by

Sean Griffin

Adviser: James Oakes

“A Reformers’ Union: Land Reform, Labor, and the Evolution of Antislavery Politics, 1790– 1860” offers a critical revision of the existing literature on both the early labor and antislavery movements by examining the ideologies and organizational approaches that labor reformers and abolitionists used to challenge both the expansion of and the spread of market relationships. Extending the timeframe of the antislavery and labor movements backwards to the 1790s, this dissertation situates the origins of the pre-Civil War labor movement in republican ideology and currents of transatlantic radical thought, and traces the rise of agrarian and communitarian labor reform against the backdrop of the growing economic and political salience of chattel slavery. While acknowledging and seeking to explain the real differences that divided labor reformers and abolitionists throughout the period, “A Reformers’ Union” argues that important strains within each movement shared common understandings about the limitations of private and the reach of the market. These shared understandings, and the discursive debates that shaped them, eventually fostered important organizational and institutional connections between the two movements, even as developments surrounding the slavery’s expansion in the 1840s and 50s inextricably linked the cause of land reform to antislavery. Land and labor reformers made critical contributions to the ideological foundations and popular appeal of the , Free Soil, and Republican parties, thus highlighting both the limitations and the potential of the politics of “free soil” and “free labor.”

iv

Table of Contents

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….... 1

Ch. 1. The Agrarian Origins of Antebellum Labor : Free Labor, Property, and Slavery in the Early Republic...... 15

Ch. 2. “The Soul of the Plan Contemplated”: New Harmony, Nashoba, and Owenite Reform in the 1820s ...... 51

Ch. 3. “As Tho This Great City Were Once Again on Fire”: The Working Men’s Parties, the , and the “Urban Agrarian” Origins of Antislavery Politics ...... 85

Ch. 4. “Our Refuge is Upon the Soil”: The National Reform Association and the Antislavery Crucible of Land Reform ...... 123

Ch. 5. “The Genius of Integral Emancipation”: Associationism and Antislavery ...... 160

Ch. 6. “That Every Man, Who Desires a Farm, Should Have One”: ’s Antislavery Frontier ...... 199

Ch. 7. Towards a “Union of Reformers”: National Reform, the Industrial Congress, and the Politics of “Free Labor, Free Soil” ...... 227

Ch. 8. From Free Soil to Homestead ...... 261

Ch. 9. -Nebraska, the Fight for Homestead, and the Rise of Republican Free Labor ...... 303

Epilogue...... 349

Bibliography...... 357

v

introduction

Sometime in October, 1828, a group of drew up a petition to Congress.

Published in the Mechanics’ Free Press, the artisan newspaper edited by Working Men’s Party leader William Heighton, the petition recommended “placing all the PUBLIC LANDS, without the delay of sales, within the reach of the people at large, by the right of a to occupancy only.” Enumerating their reasons for such a suggestion, the petitioners announced their alarm at

“the present state of affairs,” which they held “must lead to the wealth of a few, and thus place within their reach the means of controlling all the lands of our country.” They expressed their strong disapproval of “every species of monopoly and exclusive privileges,” particularly those which produced such “unnatural exclusions” from access to land. Since all men, the petitioners held, had “naturally, a birth-right in the soil”—and since, if this right was denied, “they may be deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—the petitioners respectfully recommended that the Public Lands “be reserved as a donation to the citizens of the United

States in the character of perpetual leases, free of rent” and conditional upon actual settlement.

The “true spirit of independence can not be enjoyed, by the great body of the People,” they argued, without the recognition of a natural right to the land. The passage of a law granting them

“the FREE USE of so much of the Public Lands,” along with strong deterrents to land , were “the only effectual prevention of future monopoly and the best safeguard of the

American Republic.”1

1 “Memorial to Congress,” from the Mechanics’ Free Press, 25 October 1828; in John R. and Helen L. Sumner, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society V (Cleveland: The Arthur Clark Co., 1910), 43–45.

1

The 1828 petition was not the first time that a group of urban workingmen made an appeal for access to the soil, nor would it be the last. With surprising regularity between the mid-

1820s and the beginning of the Civil War, urban workingmen looked to the land for salvation—a fact that has gone unrecognized in most recent accounts of the early labor movement and related responses to capitalist development in the period.2 Although the formation of trades unions, the emergence of “Working Men’s” political parties and their eventual merger into the Jacksonian

Democrats, and the incidence of strikes and other militant labor actions in the period were all critical to the development of the early labor movement, the importance of these developments has been somewhat artificially magnified by generations of labor historians who sought to explain the origins of twentieth-century unionism and the failure of to appear in

American politics. Perhaps more importantly, these developments appear sporadic and halting when compared to the consistency with which one reform in particular was articulated by proponents of labor between the 1820s and 1860: the demand for free homesteads or equivalent access to the land, framed as the recognition of a “right to the soil.”3

Despite what appears in retrospect to be a somewhat quixotic, even romantic, spectacle— that of wage workers in the industrializing cities of the East casting their gazes wistfully westward, even as the Jeffersonian dream of universal independent proprietorship was rapidly receding into the past—demands for the recognition of a “right to the soil” would be central to

2 Important recent exceptions include Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and : University of Press, 2005); Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the , 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Reeve Huston, Land and : Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 3 The question of “Why is there no socialism in the United States” was first raised in the form that has occupied scholars ever since by the German sociologist Werner Sombart, in Patricia M. Hocking, trans., Why Is There No Socialism in the United States (: Macmillan Press, 1976; originally published 1906). This question became the point of departure for much of the first generation of labor historiography that followed, including that of John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, Charles and Mary Beard, and others. See also, , “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States,” History Workshop, No. 17 (Spring, 1984): 57–80.

2 the evolving labor movement for decades to come. Nor was the Philadelphia petition an isolated example conceived in an American-exceptionalist vacuum. As an examination of the ideology of contemporaneous “Working Men’s” movements in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and

Boston shows, such demands were very much articulated within the framework of an understanding of republican liberty and the proper relations between labor and shaped by radical currents of thought from across the Atlantic. These currents, originating with European social thinkers and English jacobins and transplanted to American shores by English and Irish immigrants, maritime workers, and networks of print culture and correspondence, were wide- ranging and ideologically inconsistent, but they often shared a common feature, one that was amplified in the American context where land and labor existed in inverse proportions to those that obtained in the Old World. Labeled “agrarian” by adherents and enemies on both sides of the Atlantic, this strain of republican thought, in its more mainstream usage, comported well with both the agricultural economic environment of the Early Republic and the yeoman ideology of

Jefferson and Jackson. But in its more radical sense, “agrarianism” hearkened back to the demands of the Roman Gracchi of 2nd Century B.C., who demanded the redistribution of landed property to veterans and the urban poor. In this sense, agrarian ideas formed an ideological touchstone for early European and American socialism, as evidenced by the fact that both friends and enemies of redistributionist measures frequently used the terms interchangeably throughout the pre-Civil War period.4

4 On “agrarianism” and the contemporary meanings and uses of the term in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, see Thomas P. Govan, “Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words,” The Journal of Southern History 30, No. 1 (February, 1964) 35-36; Arthur E. Bestor, Jr. “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, No. 3 (June, 1948): 259–302; Carl Degler, “The Locofocos: Urban ‘Agrarians’,” Journal of Economic History 16, No. 3 (September 1956), 322-33; John Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in Early America (Charlottesville: University of Press, 2011).

3

Such agrarian demands for access to landed property were frequency coupled with a second, related aspect of the pre-Civil War labor movement: the various efforts to organize labor on a cooperative basis, often in intentional communities organized explicitly for that purpose.

Within two years of its unanswered petition to Congress, the Mechanics’ Free Press began running a regular column dedicated “To industrious mechanics with small available capitals,” urging them to pool their resources and become proprietors of the soil in small, self-sustaining communities similar to those promoted by in the previous decade. Claiming that

“the existing state of society” was “unfavorable to the health, the morals, and the general prosperity of the working classes,” the column’s anonymous author complained that, despite his status as a master tradesman, his prospects for steady employment had been rendered negligible

“by an excess of workmen.” The same situation prevailed, he claimed, “among almost all kinds of mechanics.” The solution lay not in politics or legislation, but in the self-directed efforts of

“mechanics of varied occupations” who might gather to practice agriculture and ply their respective trades “upon a semi-co-operative .” A “public mart and standard of equal exchange” would allow such a free-labor colony to escape from the tyranny of banks and paper money, while control over production and the division of labor would allow its members to regulate supply and demand, with the surplus being sold to meet demand in the surrounding countryside, thus placing them “beyond the reach of fluctuating markets, and above the fear of

‘want of employment’.” The resulting communities would secure to workers “perpetual independence,” freeing them from “RENT, that heavy link in the drag chain of oppression.”5

Both agrarian demands for the “right to the soil” and the efforts to organize cooperative free-labor communities were integral parts of an ongoing response by northern workers to the

5 “To Industrious Mechanics who possess small available capitals,” Mechanics’ Free Press, May 22, 29, 1830. See also Mechanics’ Free Press, June 5, 12; August 14; December 4, 1830.

4 series of rapid and jarring economic changes associated with the advent of industrialization, changes that included such phenomena as the intensification of the division of labor, the demise of paternalistic labor relationships and the spread of wage labor, the advent of boom-and-bust cycles of financial expansion and depression, and the entry of millions of workers into a competitive market for wages. These developments, in turn, posed a unique set of questions in the context of a slaveholding republic, questions that went to the heart of the nation’s identity and its relationship to an evolving form of market in the Early Republic and antebellum periods.

The solutions and reforms proposed by labor leaders, radical reformers, and ordinary workingmen in the decades before the Civil War are relevant to antislavery, I argue, not only because they were devised and implemented within the context of an evolving free labor economy that developed in tandem with the slaveholder capitalism of the South, but because these same ideas and approaches were applied by workingman-reformers as alternatives to both slavery and free wage labor. To say this is not to argue that northern labor reformers and wage workers were always or even usually sympathetic to ; indeed, this dissertation examines and emphasizes the ways that labor reformers were often in conflict with abolitionists over such issues as the contested meanings of freedom and slavery, the persistence of economic and other forms of inequality, and the role of property rights in shaping the latter. But out of the discursive debates over land, labor, and slavery in the 1830s and 40s emerged, if not a consensus, a degree of cooperation and coalition-building between labor reformers and abolitionists that has been largely overlooked by most of the recent literature on antislavery.6

6 Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven and London: Press, 2016) is a notable recent exception. Other recent volumes to examine the relationship between anticapitalism and antislavery include Lause, Young America; Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience; Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth.

5

In the second half of the 1840s, conflicts over the expansion of slavery into the territories provided the catalyst for attempts by labor reformers and political abolitionists to overcome their ideological differences and translate into action what they alternatively heralded as “universal reform,” “integral emancipation,” or the “union of all reforms.” Not only did the market-driven expansion of slavery and subsequent political conflict over the issue of slavery in the territories intersect inescapably in the 1850s with one of the early labor movement’s most cherished ambitions—the maintenance of the public lands as a safety-valve reserved for free labor—it drove many labor reformers into an alliance for which the ideological innovations and rhetorical interventions of the previous decade had already prepared them. By organizing “free labor” experiments and political movements around their reforms, engaging in a sustained dialogue with abolitionists, and finally entering into a tentative coalition with antislavery politicians, labor reformers helped to mobilize northern workers for the antislavery cause and lay the twin foundations of the Republican Party: free soil and free labor.

This dissertation purposefully confounds some of the categories that have long been taken for granted in the literature on labor, slavery, and antislavery. Although I occasionally employ the terms “workers” and “working-class,” I intentionally avoid making hard and fast distinctions between a “working-class” labor movement and “middle-class” labor reform in the pre-Civil War decades. This is not out of any hostility towards Marxian class analysis or sympathy with the literature that has claimed that neither a self-conscious working class nor a definable labor movement existed in pre-Civil War America; to the contrary, I believe that this dissertation highlights, in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways, the ways that antebellum workers were conscious of their role as a form of “labor” that was intrinsically, if not irreconcilably, opposed to “capital.” But as the following pages show, many of the skilled craft

6 workers who played central roles in the Working Men’s movement and early trades unions of the

1820s and 30s frequently described themselves as “reformers,” while bourgeois reformers who embraced the notion of a “harmony of ” between labor and capital had no trouble conceiving of themselves as part of the broader labor movement, and indeed often went further than their more authentically working-class counterparts in conceiving of the complete overhaul of what they termed the “Social System.”

Although the last several generations of scholarship on and labor have forever complicated the ways in which historians conceive of class in the United States of the

Early Republic and antebellum periods, the search for an “authentically” working class labor movement and the insistence on rigid distinctions between “working” and “middle” class reforms remains. These tendencies, sometimes fueled by the ideological needs and presentist concerns of historians, have been evident in the framing of the relationship between abolitionists and labor activists. Despite the careful treatment the subject has received over the years, the historiographical debate over the relationship of the abolition movement to capitalism, begun by

Eric Williams in the 1940s and reformulated by Davis in the 1970s, remains essentially unresolved.7 Meanwhile, the scholarship on “whiteness,” while adding immeasurably to our understanding of how white workers conceived of their relationship to a political in which race and slavery continued to play leading roles, has sometimes tended to blur

7 originally formulated the problem of whether, in Eric Foner’s concise phrasing, abolitionists’ acceptance of capitalist wage labor effectively “foreclosed the possibility of [more] radical criticism within northern society” in 1975 in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of 1770–1823 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Since that time, the most important contributions to this debate have been made by Foner in Politics and Ideology, 74–76; Davis, Thomas Haskell, and John Ashworth in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), and Johnathan Glickstein, “’Poverty Is Not Slavery’: American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market,” in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Unversity Press, 1979), 195–218.

7 the distinctions between slavery and other forms of race-based oppression and inequality or made racial inclusivity the sole criteria for distinguishing among the various antislaveries.8

The resulting body of scholarship has therefore usually proceeded from the presumption that abolitionists and labor reformers were fundamentally at odds with one another, even as historians have argued that the key concerns of each were channeled into a compromised, and possibly racist, Republican “free labor antislavery.” Although numerous studies have enhanced our understanding of what Eric Foner termed the “ideology of free labor” almost forty years ago, historians have yet to fully respond to his call to consider “how different might have infused it with different meanings.”9 This dissertation does not dispute the assertion that the labor and antislavery movements were often at loggerheads, nor does it elide the role of race in shaping the way different reformers approached the questions posed by the issues of the eradication of slavery and the place of African Americans in a post-slavery nation. But it does attempt to place the debates over these questions in a broad temporal and ideological context, and suggest how different groups within the broader formations of antislavery and labor— democratic , land reformers, Working Men, Locofocos, Owenites, Fourierists,

Garrisonians, Libertymen, Republicans, free black abolitionists, and others—approached these debates from different perspectives and contributed their own understandings to terms like “free soil” and “free labor.” Just as significantly, it hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the way these

8 Exemplary works representing the “whiteness” school include David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 2003). 9 See particularly the revised introduction to Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), ix–xxxix, as well as Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), , American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350 – 1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of Press, 1991); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Era of Slave Emancipation (Chicago and New York: University of Chicago, 1998); William Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 4 (1985).

8 movements helped determine the expectations and shape the outcomes of the political realignment that took place beginning with the in 1846 and culminating with the formation and rise to power of the Republican Party in 1854–56. At the heart of the process that resulted in antislavery becoming “at length” what Republican William H. Seward described as “a respectable element in politics” were some very unrespectable, indeed decidedly radical, views.

What these less-than-respectable viewpoints shared in common was a wariness of the economic changes associated with the rise to dominance of a market-based capitalist economy and a skepticism towards the ideologies and arguments used to justify the emerging market in competitive wage labor. While this dissertation shares the main contention of the recent literature on “slavery and capitalism” that slavery was indeed capitalist, it seeks to further define what capitalism meant for both proponents and antagonists of the nation’s evolving political economy.

Not only has most of the recent literature ignored the role of free labor in the relationship between slavery and capitalism almost completely, it has elided the very distinction, long considered critical to understanding the rise of industrial capitalism, between slave and free wage labor.10 If the free labor system of the North and the slave labor system of the South were indeed identical, as some in the labor movement contended, then abolitionists should have attacked capitalism, and anticapitalist labor reformers pursued the abolition of slavery with far greater vigor than they did. The fact that they did not, or at least that their challenges to what Marx called “the pedestal and the veil”—the slave-labor base and wage-labor superstructure of

10 Key works in the new literature on slavery and capitalism include Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge and London: Press, 2013); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). See also the recent collection edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Press, 2016). For a trenchant criticism of this body of work, see John J. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies 2, No. 2 (Fall 2015): 381–304.

9 capitalist relations—were paradoxical and inconsistent, suggests that more muted understandings of the nature of capitalist change were in play.11

Although many labor reformers attacked “the wages system,” most did not seek to completely overhaul it (indeed many clung to the belief, derived from classical economics, that wages were determined by immutable laws of supply and demand), but merely to find ways to circumvent or alleviate the worst effects of the competitive market in wage labor. Chief among these was the condition of “dependence” that free workers insisted the wage relationship imposed on them. Hence the frequent comparisons between “” and chattel slavery.

Although the language of wage slavery, like that of “independence” and “dependence,” was derived from a longstanding tradition within republican ideology, it also provides a clue as to how those in the early labor movement understood the unprecedented economic transformations around them. Where defenders of “free labor,” including many abolitionists, saw freedom of choice and economic mobility, wage laborers and those who spoke for them frequently saw themselves trapped in a cycle of “dependence” on a volatile and punishing market for labor; slaves as “dependent” on their masters for food and shelter; the landless as “dependent” on and on the speculative market in land.

Undergirding these fears of dependence and economic coercion were competing understandings of the nature of and limitations to property rights. Writing recently of the abolitionists’ assault on the institution of property in human beings, James Oakes has quoted E.P.

Thompson’s observation that “What was often at issue was not property, supported by law,

11 Walter Johnson has used this metaphor, derived from , in “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early American Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004): 299–304. Johnson cites Marx’s contention that “The veiled slavery of the wage-workers in neded, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.” Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (New York, 1967) I: 699.

10 against no-property; it was alternative definitions of property rights.”12 Thompson was speaking of eighteenth-century English , but the same holds true for the both the antislavery and early labor movements in the nineteenth century. Even those labor reformers who identified their methods as “socialist” and openly called for the “community of property” rarely got very far in their redistributionist schemes. But nearly all called for some kind of intervention into the reigning regime of property rights, whether in land, labor, or human beings. To some extent, both labor reformers, who insisted that the only legitimate property was that created by labor, and abolitionists, who vehemently denied the legitimacy of property in man, were grappling with the question of what could and could not be commodified in a market-based society. Although many labor leaders initially held themselves aloof from the notion that their struggle to abolish or alter property relations in land or wage labor were interconnected with the struggle to abolish property in human beings, in time the causes of land reform, ten hours laws, cooperative ventures and other interventions into absolute property rights led them, directly or indirectly, into an alliance with political abolitionists.

Throughout the pages that follow, I seek the origins of labor reformers’ understandings of free labor and slavery by attempting to locate them within a tradition of radical republican thought. Chapter One explores the origins of “free labor” and “free soil” in a tradition of republican political thought that in some ways extends back to the English Civil War. More important to the agrarian tradition, however, are those political thinkers associated with the transatlantic radical of the Age of Revolution, a group which includes ,

John Gray, William Ogilvie, and Thomas Spence. These figures’ radical reconsiderations of slavery and liberal political economy made their way into the writing and thought of early artisan

12 James Oakes, “Slavery Is ,” Jacobin, August 13, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/slavery-abolition- lincoln-oakes-property/.

11 and democratic radicals in the post- United States, along with the more widely- accepted understandings promoted by such figures as , , and Thomas

Jefferson. Central to the political philosophy of democratic and pro-labor editors like William

Duane and William Heighton was an understanding of property rights as limited by the needs of the res publica. While this brand of “agrarianism” shared much in common with the Jeffersonian ideal of rural yeoman independence, with which it is sometimes conflated, it also had the potential to transcend the ideological compromises on slavery wrought by the Democratic-

Republican coalition between northern and southern producers.

Chapter Two moves from the port cities of the East to the plains of and the

Tennessee frontier in the mid-1820s, where radical reformer attempted a free labor experiment intended to demonstrate the feasibility of abolishing slavery via a transition to free labor. Wright’s experiment, although it proved ultimately ill-fated, was modeled on the example provided by the British “utopian” reformer Robert Owen—whose New Harmony community in Indiana would itself have not been possible had not a group of antislavery English immigrants first helped secure the region for “free soil.” Nor would Wright’s experiment have been possible in the political climate of the following decade, when the advent of , the continued expansion of the cotton kingdom, and the rise of Garrisonian abolitionism made Owen and Wright’s brand of antislavery untenable. Chapter Three follows

Wright and to , where they became embroiled in a dispute over leadership of the city’s nascent Working Men’s Party. Although a growing anti-abolitionist climate and the absorption of the Working Men into the Jacksonian Democratic coalition sometimes precluded the outspoken support for abolitionism, figures associated with both the

Working Men and the Locofocos, including Thomas Skidmore, William Heighton, Stephen

12

Simpson, William Leggett, and George Henry Evans, helped develop powerful antislavery arguments predicated on their understandings of property, labor, equality, and independence.

Chapter Four moves to the heart of my argument by focusing on the ideology and activism of the National Reform Association, the labor-based land reform organization formed by Evans in the mid-1840s. Although Evans’ 1830s support for abolitionism was arguably compromised by his prioritization of land reform in the 1840s, land reformers entered into a sustained discourse with abolitionists that resulted, among other things, in the development of a theory of property rights which would both inform and challenge later conceptions of free labor and free soil. Chapter Five looks at the Associationists, communitarian followers of French social thinker whose ranks included a number of prominent abolitionists, and who eventually came to endorse a theory of “universal reform” that embraced the abolition of both chattel and “wage” slavery. Chapter Six examines the conversion of abolitionist Gerrit

Smith to the land reform cause, and attempts to place his efforts to resettle free blacks and poor whites on his vast landholdings in upstate New York, a project that I argue stemmed from his engagement with land reform and other free soil experiments in the period. Land reformers, abolitionists, and Associationists make common cause in Chapter Seven, through the instrumentality of the annual the Industrial Congresses that were held from 1845 on. During the same years, fallout from the Mexican War and the Wilmot Proviso forced a political realignment that came to include a coalition between the National Reformers and the antislavery Liberty

Party.

Although that alliance proved fragile, Chapter Eight suggests that the demise of Free

Soilism, the collapse of the 1848 in Europe, and the mainstreaming of land reform radicalism into “Homestead” legislation did not necessarily preclude either labor or antislavery

13 militancy. Rather, as Chapter Nine concludes, the revived conflict over the issue of slavery in the territories by the Kansas-Nebraska Act reinvigorated labor movement antislavery and drove many labor reformers and workingmen into the new Republican Party. Even as “free labor” and

“free soil” became the vehicles by which the Republicans translate antislavery into a mass movement, labor reformers and radicals continued to articulate a radically different vision of these ideas. The implications of this conflict, which I attempt to spell out in an Epilogue, would not become fully clear until after the war.

As I write this, one of the most grueling and contentious presidential elections in living memory is grinding to a halt. Some commentators have suggested that, regardless of its result, the potential fallout from this election season portends a political party realignment of the sort perhaps not seen since the demise of the “Second Party System” in the mid-1850s. Others have suggested that the dark-horse populism of the Republican candidate bears comparison to Andrew

Jackson. Regardless, the tensions seen throughout this extraordinary campaign season between approaches that emphasize economic issues and those that have focused on race, gender, and identity have too often been treated in the media and amongst the ever-growing online pundit class as though they were polar opposites instead of mutually-reinforcing tendencies. Although

“intersectionality” has become a favorite academic buzzword of recent years, only time will tell if the tentative connections forged in the weeks and months leading up to the 2016 election will blossom into a sustained debate or movement capable of transcending the ephemeral excitement of a political campaign and the increasingly cordoned-off spaces of the academy. In the meantime, historians, activists, and others might look to what labor leaders and abolitionists once labeled the “Union of Reformers” for an illuminating illustration of the possibilities and limitations of such reformist collaborations.

14

CHAPTER ONE The Agrarian Origins of Antebellum Labor Radicalism: Free Labor, Property, and Slavery in the Early Republic

In the spring and summer of 1779, at the height of the Revolutionary crisis, a far less visible revolution was taking place in Philadelphia. Amid the wharves, shops, and rowhouses that were slowly filling in the outlines of William Penn’s grid, the contours of a new debate were being shaped. In the midst of wartime scarcity, currency devaluation, and consequent high prices for essential goods, a popularly-elected Committee on Trade urged a set of price controls on the city’s merchants, some of whom had begun to hoard flour, foodstuffs, and other necessities. The two sides of the debate that emerged in response to the imposition of price controls revealed starkly divergent conceptions of economic justice, their basic contours still recognizable today.

In justifying the measures, the Committee on Trade claimed that “the general ” was being undermined by “a species of delinquents... governed by avarice” who hoarded goods and sold them across the state border at inflated prices. “It has long been said that trade will regulate itself,” the Committee noted, “yet sufficient experience has shewn that the maxim, though admittedly true in some cases, is not so in all.” In response, a delegation of merchants, after first pleading their patriotic credentials, argued that the unencumbered ultimately best served the needs of the community. Individual self-interest, they claimed, mediated through the natural laws of supply and demand, would ultimately redound to the greater good. The practice of setting limits on prices was unjust, the merchants complained, “because it invades the laws of

15 property, by compelling a person to accept of less in exchange for his goods than he could otherwise obtain.”13

A newly-formed “Committee for Enquiring into the State of Trade,” known as the

Committee of Thirteen, answered the merchants’ complaint. Dominated by artisans, lesser workingmen, and political radicals—Tom Paine was a prominent member, and the group’s chairman was Blair McClenahan, the political leader of the city’s craft workers—the Committee of Thirteen declared that “the social compact... requires, that every right and power claimed or exercised by any man or set of men, should be in subordination to the .” The merchants’ free market defense of absolute property rights was spurious, they held, “not only on account of the fatal or dangerous consequences attending it,” but because the merchants’ very trade was dependent on “the collected efforts of the community”—on the labor of the craft workers and lesser workingmen who made it possible. Therefore the “ of public justice and common good” demanded that merchants fulfill their part of the bargain by providing the

“service” of selling their wares at reasonable rates. The analogy chosen by the Committee to illustrate this point reflected both Philadelphia’s status as a hub of waterfront commerce and the increasing preponderance of wage labor in colonial cities. Although the “ship carpenters, joiners, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, blockmakers, tanners, curriers, painters” and other workers that made trade possible had given up their right to a direct property in the vessels they were outfitting, they had not, by agreeing to accept compensation in “meer wages,” forfeited their right “in the service of the vessel, because it constitutes a considerable part of the advantage they hoped to derive from their labours.” Such workers had a property in their labor, the Committee held, that was as inviolable as the merchants’ property in their goods or ships. By agreeing to substitute the

13 Pennsylvania Packet or General Advertiser, 29 June, 10 September 1779.

16 products of their labor for wages, those who labored had entered into a tacit agreement with merchants that they would be able to purchase those products on reasonable terms. Thus, the debate over the meaning of “” contained within it a debate over the meaning of free labor.14

The debate begun in Philadelphia in 1779 was, in some ways, never resolved. In the post-

Revolutionary years, it would begin take on even more portentous meaning as the economies of the northern states, led by port cities like Philadelphia, slowly but perceptibly shifted from their mercantile and export-based origins to become key centers of production serving emerging domestic markets, with significant (although not yet dominant) sectors involved in manufacturing and a growing population that labored for wages. As early as 1788, a French visitor to Philadelphia, Brissot de Warville, could remark that “manufactories are rising in the town and country, and industry and emulation increase with great rapidity.” Unofficial industrial censuses of the city undertaken by Brissot that year and, twenty years later, by Assistant

Treasury Secretary Tench Coxe, revealed a sizeable smattering of textile, leather, iron and other metalworks, glass, candle, soap, and furniture manufactories alongside small shops and outworkers’ homes. By 1820—in the midst of a national depression—Philadelphia city and country boasted 30 textile, 25 leather, 15 metalworking, and ten flour manufactories along with numerous shops producing furniture, carriages and wagons, hats, bricks, soap, candle, and paper- making enterprises.15 By that time, the spread of cash- and credit-based market relationships and the shift to wage labor were well underway, even if the transition from older forms of labor

14 The activities of the Committee on Trade and the Committee of Thirteen have been examined in greater detail by Ronald Schultz; see Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 54–68; Schultz, “Small Producer Thought in Early America, Part I: Philadelphia Artisans and Price Control,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 54, No. 2 (April, 1987), 115–147; Richard Alan Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978). 15 Schultz, Republic of Labor, 164–68.

17 defined by paternalistic relationships and extra-economic forms of coercion was halting and inconsistent, with some forms of non-slave “unfree” labor extending well into the early decades of the nineteenth century.16

With the revival of industry and of trade with an industrializing Great Britain after the

War of 1812, workers found themselves thrust into a competitive market for labor, many for the first time. Just as importantly, the rise of industrial methods of production that involved the division of labor and increased reliance on technology, craft workers found themselves caught in a process of deskilling, especially in the so-called “sweated trades” of tailoring and shoemaking and in industries marked by high levels of technological change, like printing. Although many artisans and mechanics doubtless benefitted from the transition to free wage labor, the economic changes associated with the spread of market relationships nonetheless had a dramatic impact on the daily lives and livelihoods of thousands of urban workers. While some small masters and journeymen were able to transition successfully, accumulating capital and becoming employers themselves, many others became trapped in a condition of propertylessness and poverty, with only their labor power to sell. Thrust into an unregulated market for wage labor, the workhouse, prison, or starvation beckoned as alternatives for those who could not or would not find work,

16 For statistics and estimates of the numbers of wage workers in the U.S. between the Revolution and Civil War, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xv – xvi; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the , 1862–1872 (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 28–30. Montgomery’s estimate is based on data from the “Ninth Census of the United States” (1870); the estimate of forty percent in 1860 was originally determined by Stanley Lebergott. As John Ashworth points out, given the low numbers of wage workers in the South, the national figure of forty percent “assuredly means” that the majority of employed workers in the North were working for wages by the Civil War. See John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: Volume 2: The Coming of the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 297, n. 244. On the persistence of various forms of “unfree” labor in the early republic, see Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350 – 1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

18 especially in the aftermath of economic depressions in 1787, 1802–04, 1807, 1812, and 1819.

Meanwhile, cities like Philadelphia, and New York garnered the dubious distinction of being the most economically stratified places in the North in the 1820s—although they remained far more equal in terms of wealth distribution than the counties in coastal South Carolina or along the Mississippi River Valley, where slaveholding wealth was most concentrated.17

By the late 1820s, Philadelphia, nearly simultaneously with other northeastern seaport cities on the forefront of economic change, would give birth to the nation’s first identifiable organized labor movement. Historians have long described the reformers, activists, and ordinary workers that comprised the labor movement of the 1820s and 30s, as “agrarian” in outlook.18

Indeed, many of the skilled workers whom Jefferson had once called “the yeomen of the city” would cling to older, republican understandings of free labor, based on craft tradition and paternalistic labor arrangements. Many would continue to look to the land for salvation, idealizing agricultural and other forms of “productive” labor and arguing that the public lands should be protected from speculative purchase and set aside for settlement by workingmen.

Others would actively cultivate an alliance, based on an awareness of shared interests as society’s “producers,” with small farmers and rural constituencies—including southern slaveowners. This “producerist” alliance, although strained at times and often more fragile than historians have generally conceded, forged an important component of both the Democratic-

Republican and Jacksonian political coalitions.19

17 Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350—1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). , Chants Democratic; Seth Rockman, Scraping By; Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass: 1979). 18 Carl Degler, “Urban Agrarians”; John Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 19 Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”; Schlesinger, Sellers, others?

19

But still others associated with the emerging labor movement, particularly those who were inspired by the radically democratic tradition of Paine, were “agrarian” in a different sense.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, political thinkers revived the term in reference to the revolutionary period of Roman history, when the Gracchi, 2nd Century B.C. tribunes, attempted to divide aristocratic landholdings among veterans and the poor and were assassinated for their troubles. By the early nineteenth century, the word had come to be nearly synonymous with

“radical,” but with an added economic connotation often missing from that term; soon both political radicals and their conservative opponents would use “agrarian” to describe any system that proposed to interfere with existing property relationships. The “agrarians” of early nineteenth-century America only rarely advocated an “equal division” of landed property, but they did call for dramatic interventions into a post-Revolutionary property regime based on land, slavery, and the new concentrations of wealth made possible by speculation and commerce.

Agreeing with Jefferson that “the earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live in,” they would support policies for distributing landed property as widely as possible. A few would go further, developing specific projects and plans to redistribute wealth and property, by intervention if necessary. At the heart of this agrarian strain of thought was the appeal for a distribution of wealth based on the widespread idea that a relatively equal distribution of property was essential to the functioning of a republican government. The agrarian ideology of the early national period upheld the notion that all men had the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, but insisted that undue concentrations of wealth and property, especially landed property, undermined this outcome and threatened to lead to the creation of a new aristocracy of propertied men.20

20 Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1948), 262–63; Jefferson to Madison, 28 October 1785, in Boyd and Catanzariti, eds., Papers of Jefferson, VIII, 681-82.

20

Agrarian ideology posed a threat to slavery on at least two grounds. In its first, more basic meaning, it raised the specter of competition for land between free labor and slavery.

Bottled up in eastern cities where the oversupply of labor and fluctuations of the economy meant the demand for employment was often stagnant, wage workers were increasingly desirous of obtaining access to the public lands, including the millions of acres acquired as a result of the

Louisiana Purchase. As we shall see, it was this first, more narrow sense of agrarianism that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the producerist alliance between northern workers and southern slaveowners, and that provided a vehicle for the insertion of antislavery into the mass politics of the 1840s and 50s. But it was in its second, more subtle sense of a reconsideration of property rights that agrarianism posed a graver, perhaps even existential threat to slaveholders.

After abolitionists identified the paradox of holding “property in man” as the essential sin of slavery—an argument they would make with increasing frequency and precision as the years went on—slaveholders would with equal vehemence insist on an absolute right to their enslaved property, for which they demanded the protection of the federal government and Constitution.

For obvious reasons, then, neither southern slaveholders nor northern conservatives could tolerate agrarian ideas. Ultimately it would be the Republican Party that, by identifying self- as the essential condition of freedom, would do the most to undermine slaveholders’ insistence on their right to slave property and to universalize a re-definition of wage labor as free labor, diametrically opposed to slavery. But they could not have done so without the ideological contributions of the agrarian tradition, a tradition carried principally by the followers of

Paine, Jefferson, and Jackson.

In the period between the Revolution and the Crisis, the bearers of this agrarian tradition—radical democrats, labor spokesmen, craft workers, and others—would contribute to

21 the ideological foundations of political antislavery in at least three important ways. While most did not—as yet—attack the institution of slave property directly, they would seize on and develop an agrarian strain of republican ideology to argue that individual rights to property, while generally sacrosanct, could in some cases be modified or subordinated to the greater good of the society, or to the “natural rights” of life and liberty. In a related corollary, agrarians would attack concentrations of wealth and property, especially property in land, as aristocratic and antirepublican. And they would begin to construct the foundations of free labor ideology on the basis of two important and interrelated ideas, the right to what they called “the fruits of labor” and the . Other ideas about the relationships between labor, property, and political economy would be more slowly dislodged by the economic disruptions created by an emerging industrial capitalism and absorbed into the American consciousness between the

Revolution and the Civil War. In the interim, such ideas would provide powerful tools with which critics and reformers would begin to forge weapons against slavery, inequality, and aristocratic concentrations of wealth and power.

Early National Land Policy and the Agrarian Tradition

Few historians would dispute the centrality of land and land ownership to American history. From the moment of the discovery of the New World, the seemingly limitless availability of land and the relative scarcity of labor stoked the dreams which gave impetus to the migration of European , provided the justification for the conquest of Native Americans and the importation of African slave labor, defined Americans’ notions of freedom and property, and shaped the doctrine of “exceptionalism” that would forever after color American thinking

22 about labor, economic and political life, and America’s role in the world.21 Labor reformers and ordinary workers continued to look to the land as a “safety valve” through which urban workers might hope to escape the poverty and overcrowding of cities; New farmers moved west to escape the limitations of rocky soil divided and subdivided among successive generations; southern slaveholders fled the tobacco-depleted soil of and Virginia for the fertile cotton lands of the Mississippi River Valley; and political economists viewed the availability of land as a way out of the Malthusian population trap predicted by economists like Malthus and

David Ricardo. Long before Jefferson’s vision of an “empire of liberty” had curdled into the reality of an empire for slavery, the issue of how best to organize and distribute the public lands preoccupied the attention of the nation’s lawmakers. After the Revolution, hundreds of thousands of acres of territory—the largest portion of what would become the United States—remained in the public domain, unorganized and still inhabited largely by Native Americans.22

Appropriately enough given his future role as the architect of the Louisiana Purchase and the main defender of the yeoman ideal, it was Jefferson who did the most to determine the future geography of the long-disputed territory west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi

River secured by the United States from Britain after the War of Independence.23 Even before he had fully articulated his vision of a “yeoman republic” of independent landowning farmers,

Jefferson had pushed for laws abolishing and entail in Virginia as “the best of all

Agrarian laws,” which he claimed “would prevent the accumulation and perpetuation of wealth

21 The monumental statement and point of departure for most of the scholarly work on the frontier, the safety valve, and their relationship to American exceptionalism of course remains Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis.” See Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History: A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, 12 July 1893, during the World Columbian Exposition,” as well as Turner’s published account, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1935). For contemporary take on American exceptionalism and its relation to free labor and western expansion, see Jonathan Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety. 22 James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 155–62. 23 See Jefferson portrait in NRA pamphlet; Evans’ “Declaration.”

23 in select families,” and remove “the feudal and unnatural distinctions” which made first-born sons rich and cast others into poverty and dependence.24 In a letter to , Jefferson wrote that among “the consequences of this enormous inequality” in landholding in aristocratic

Europe were “the production of so much misery to the bulk of mankind.” Both founders, however, thought of agrarianism in its then-contemporary sense of a forced equalization of property as a dangerous and “levelling” doctrine, and sought ameliorative measures such as the abolition of primogeniture and the opening of western lands as bulwarks against this disturbing tendency. Madison was skeptical that republican government could completely alleviate poverty and warned against the “improper and wicked object” of “an equal division of property,” but agreed that “the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate wherever the Government assumes a freer aspect, and the laws favor a subdivision of property.” Madison blamed Shays’

Rebellion on the “levelling spirit,” and warned of the danger of “agrarian attempts in this country” at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, while Jefferson praised Congress in 1813 for providing “protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people.”25

In 1784, as chairman of the committee to draft a plan for the government of the Western

Territory, as it was then known, Jefferson proposed dividing the land into square miles using geographic lines running north-south and east-west and crossing one another at right angles.

After passage of an “Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing lands in the western territory,” better known as the Land Ordinance of 1785, teams of geographers and surveyors set

24 , “Autobiography,” in Merrill D. Paterson, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 100–101, 44. [check this citation] 25 Jefferson to Madison, 28 October 1785, and Madison to Jefferson, 19 June 1786, in Boyd and Catanzariti, eds., Papers of Jefferson, VIII, 659–60, 681–82; Madison, “Federalist No. 10,” in David Wooten, ed., The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers (, IN: Hackett, 2009), 51; Thomas P. Govan, “Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words,” The Journal of Southern History 30, No. 1 (February, 1964) 35-36.

24 out using “Gunter’s chains” to demarcate rectangular plots following “as near as may be” along lines of meridian. The 1785 Ordinance established the basic unit of division for surveying and selling land, the township of 36 square miles. Such regular, rectangular divisions not only reflected an Enlightenment impulse to impose rational order on unruly space, but made for a relatively quick and inexpensive process of parceling out land out for sale. The division of land under the 1785 Ordinance also illustrated the competing imperatives faced by Jefferson and other lawmakers. Given the overwhelmingly agricultural economy of the young nation and Jefferson’s own vision of a burgeoning “yeoman republic,” the wide distribution of land in the hands of relatively large numbers of independent proprietor-farmers ranked as an important priority. And yet, at least as important was the need to facilitate the orderly transfer of land via sale to private owners. A systematic approach to surveying and dividing the public lands would best avoid lawsuits and avoid jeopardizing the considerable claims to landholdings already made, thus ensuring that would be protected, while further rationalizing the institution of land as a saleable . Lastly, the division of land into square sections would provide a rational template for further expansion westward, adding a sense of inevitability to the “empire of liberty” that Jefferson and others were already projecting across the continent.26

The ideological contours of the debates over public land policy for decades to come— between those who viewed the use of public land sales as a means of raising revenue, and those who prioritized rapid settlement and widespread dispersion of land ownership—were thus in place even before Jefferson, Madison, and the other Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the Articles of . The 1785 Ordinance provided for townships to be further divided into mile-square sections of 640 acres each, and established that the townships were

26 Hildegard Binder Johnson, “Towards a National Landscape,” in Michael P. Conzen, ed., The Making of the American Landscape (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 127–29. Note contributions of others, including Hugh Williamson and .

25 saleable “by lots or entire” at the rate of $1 per acre. Despite this seemingly bargain-barrel price, the Ordinance also required buyers to purchase a minimum of one (640-acre, or one square mile) section, thus effectively restricting land sales to those who could come up with $640—the equivalent of approximately two years’ income for a skilled tradesman. Worse still, from the perspective of those who hoped to gain access to cheap land, was the Land Act of 1796, which doubled the price of land from $1 to $2 an acre.27

For a new nation deeply in debt, land-rich but capital-poor, the selling off of public lands was seen by those who later cohered into the Federalist party as the most expedient way to raise the revenue with which to replentish the Treasury’s coffers. But for much the Democratic-

Republican opposition that arose in the 1790s, a public land policy that favored using land sales to raise revenue over one that distributed them widely and cheaply across the population was second only to Hamilton’s plan for the assumption of Revolutionary War debts as an object of opprobrium. Like Hamilton’s financial system, critics complained that the land policies promoted by Federalists privileged speculators and “landjobbers” at the expense of small farmers, Revolutionary War veterans, and urban artisan-producers. Hamilton’s debt plan provided for repayment in full to the small number of speculators who had purchased debt certificates from veterans and other ordinary citizens, often at 10 to 20 percent of their face value; Democratic-Republican critics pointed out that such a policy redistributed wealth to an already well-off elite “by taking advantage of the distressed part of the community.” Others, like the self-educated Revolutionary War veteran William Manning, complained that “Speculators,

Stock & Land Jobers” had “risen like a black cloud over the Continant... They have got the prinsaple command of our funds, & not only swindle honest individuals out of their property, but

27 Johnson, “Towards a National Landscape,” 129; Helene Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Press, 1941), 3–5.

26 by their bribery & corruption have grate influence in our elections, & agitate our publick

Counsels.”28

In a similar vein, the Virginian St. George Tucker directed his ire towards land policies in a widely-circulated 1796 pamphlet. Tucker complained that if the public lands were allowed to be “sold in large tracts to Speculators, who mean to sell again,” the resulting sale at profits of two or three times the original value would leave “the industrious farmer” and other “poor men... wholly excluded from the market.” Tucker warned of the danger that speculation in land posed to the new nation, since “the foundations of the modern aristocratic families in the various parts of

Europe, were laid in the immense grants of land... If the territory of the United States be granted, in like manner, to a few rich, and ambitious men, disposed to aggrandize themselves and their posterity, the seeds of an aristocracy will be sown.” The solution, Tucker suggested, was to limit land sales to “actual settlers”—a phrase which would echo throughout the long career of agrarian reform in America. A number of democratic commentators agreed, recommending the distribution of public lands “on agrarian principles,” despite the unprecedented intervention of government into the sphere of economic activity this would entail. Tucker’s preferred vision for the settlement of public lands, moreover, was not the atomized of the frontier pioneer, with which image of the ruggedly-independent Jeffersonian yeoman farmer is usually associated; rather, he proposed dividing the public lands “as in , into small townships... subdivided into lots not exceeding two hundred acres.”29

28 The Argus, 16 August 1791; quoted in Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in Early America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 137; Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., William Manning, The Key of Libberty: Shewing the Causes Why a Free Government Has Always Failed, and a Remedy Against It (Billerica, MA: The Manning Association, 1922), 25–26. The solution Manning proposed was for “farmers, mechanicks, and laborers” to form a “Labouring Society” that could act as a counterweight to the political power created by the accumulation of wealth in landed property. See “Constitution of the Laboring Society,” in Morison, ed., Key of Libberty, 67–71. 29 St. George Tucker, Cautionary Hints to Congress Respecting the Sale of the Western Lands Belonging to the United States (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1796).

27

Tucker singled out his native Virginia, where slaveholding planters had long ago engrossed the best lands with the aid of enslaved and indentured laborers under the headright system, for special condemnation. As an unlikely antislavery polemicist and ardent advocate of gradual emancipation, Tucker surely knew that the patterns of slaveholding , were, like slavery itself, “perfectly irreconcilable... to the principles of a democracy.” Regardless, the connection between slavery and land ownership was more explicitly spelled out by others in the period, and was shared by those with widely divergent political views. Tucker’s gradual- emancipationist Dissertation on Slavery was circulated by the antislavery minister

Jeremy Belknap; while South Carolina Federalist David Ramsay noted in an early history of the

American Revolution that slavery had led in southern states to “the engrossing of land, in the hands of a few.” Earlier, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush had argued that the abolition of slavery would “promote that equal distribution of property, which appears best calculated to promote the of a Society.”30 In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance embodied that very principle by banning slavery from the territories north of the River, thereby establishing an important precedent for federal regulation of slavery in the territories and prefiguring the language eventually adopted by the Thirteenth Amendment.31

30 Tucker, Cautionary Hints; Tucker, A dissertation on slavery, with a proposal for the gradual abolition of it, in the state of Virginia (Philadephia: Printed for Matthew Carey, 1796); Nathaniel Appleton to Jeremy Belknap, 26 February 1795, Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; A Pennsylvanian [Benjamin Rush], An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America Upon Slave-Keeping (Philadelphia, 1773), 7. For similar elucidations of agrarianism by democratic partisans in the 1790s, see Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 156; David Ramsay, History of the American Revolution, I, 24. 31 The Ordinance’s antislavery provisions, although sometimes circumvented by proslavery southerners who brought slaves over the border as “indentured servants,” were given added force as a national antislavery precedent since the legislation declared itself to be “Articles of compact between the original States and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent...” For a different view on the role of Jeffersonians on slavery expansion, see John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

28

Before the new nation was even established, the seeds of two interrelated conflicts had been sown: the debates surrounding proper policy governing the division of public land; and the looming issue of slavery in the territories.

Democratic-Republican Radicals and the Agrarian Reconsideration of Property Rights

In the 1790s, the rise of a Democratic-Republican opposition would challenge an emerging consensus about the absolute sanctity of property by seizing on an older, agrarian or

“civic” tradition of republican thought. The engrossment of land by slaveholders and speculators was thus viewed by many in the early republic to pose a significant threat to republican independence, social mobility, and democratic notions of equality. More ominously still to the defenders of absolute property rights, they would begin to crystallize the agrarian strain of thought into expanded considerations of the circumstances under which individual property rights might be violated and begin to apply these justifications towards positive schemes for the redistribution of wealth, particularly landed wealth.

The advent of the Democratic-Republican opposition to Federalist policies in turn gave rise to a newly-assertive culture of democratic thought and activity. The radically egalitarian ideas popularized by the , the emergence of Democratic-Republican societies and “jacobin clubs,” and the publication of works like Paine’s Rights of Man and Agrarian

Justice, ’s Political Justice, and Volney’s The Ruins (the last three were all published in the United States within the same year, between 1796–97) all conspired to facilitate the circulation of radically democratic ideas throughout the Revolutionary Atlantic. To be sure, most democratic thinkers in the Age of Revolution continued to uphold the classical republican commitment to the sanctity of property. But many attacked large concentrations of wealth and called for interventions into the property rights of large landholders in the name of promoting

29 equality and the economic well-being of the community as a whole. As Seth Cotlar has concluded, in the aftermath of the revolutionary fervor that permeated the early republic,

“ about the nature of property rights or recommendations for ways to mildly redistribute wealth struck many democratic readers of the early 1790s as logical and potentially promising outgrowths of the egalitarian spirit of the age.”32

Most agrarian reformers throughout the Age of Revolution thus did not dispute the basic inviolability of property rights. It was simply that, under certain circumstances, certain kinds of property could be subordinated for the good of the res publica. That the apparent tension between private property rights and the good of the whole could be reconciled by democratic thinkers is captured by an excerpt from a lecture by the radical English republican John Thelwall to an audience of workingmen in a London tavern: “All private property was sacred,” Thelwall was reported to have said, “unless too unbounded & used for the oppression of the lower orders of the people & then it would & ought to be subject to their regulation.”33 While the logical conclusions of agrarian thought could and did have subversive possibilities (Thelwall was imprisoned for treason on the basis of the above quotation, recorded by a government spy), agrarian ideas were hardly confined to subterranean radicals lurking in waterfront taverns. Like other ideas associated with Anglo-American political thought in the Age of Revolution, they were widely circulated throughout the Atlantic World; Thelwall, for example, was the founder

32 Quoted in Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 115, 129. See also Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), especially pp. 67–96. 33 Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 135. Thelwall was “one of the most active members” as well as the “chief orator, strategist, and theoretician” of the London Corresponding Society, an association of working-class reformers that sought to expand political participation and spread ideas on political economy via pamphlets and printed lectures, some of which ended up in the hands of democratic-republican radicals in the seaport cities of the United States. That Thelwall’s words were recorded by John Taylor, a government spy, suggests how threatening they must have been to the established order. Thelwall was later put on trial for treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Although he was acquitted, the London Corresponding Society— described by E.P. Thompson as “the first definitely working-class political organisation formed in Britain”—was outlawed shortly thereafter. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 18–21; Gregory Claeys, ed., The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall (University Park, Pa: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), xiii, xxiii.

30 and chief organizer of the London Corresponding Society, a group established for the purpose of disseminating radical tracts on politics and political economy. Sailors and other maritime workers were instrumental in carrying these ideas across the Revolutionary Atlantic, and to the far corners of the world, where they were picked up and adapted for local use.34

Works and treatises that interrogated the origins of property rights and contemplated various schemes for redistributing property were deeply rooted in Western political culture. In the aftermath of the English Civil War, the republican theorist James Harrington argued in The

Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), a utopian account of a fictitious ideal republic, that property in land was the crucial determinant of power in a state, and recommended that a commonwealth be founded on “Agrarian” principles by abolishing primogeniture and limiting individual estates to those with annual rents of no more than two thousand pounds. A host of later republican writers, including , Francis Hutcheson, and Catherine Macaulay, also endorsed some level of redistribution of landed property. The association of republicanism with agrarian ideas, described by some political scientists as “civic republicanism,” thus long predated the

Revolution and Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy. But it was also found to be highly compatible with the values of and republicanism for which the Revolution had been fought, and therefore, its advocates hoped, uniquely adaptable to the new circumstances brought about by rapid commercial expansion and economic change in which they found themselves. 35 In the rebellious North American colonies and post-Revolutionary United States, statements and policies insisting that property played an essential social function and that

34 Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution; Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra, 35 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 105-6; 118; James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 34; Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 78- 79. On “civic republicanism,” see Matthew H. Kramer, “Liberty and Dominion,” in Laborde and Maynor, eds., Republicanism and Political Theory, 31-57; Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to Cooperative Commonwealth, 17.

31 relatively equal distributions of wealth were essential to the functioning of a republic were particularly widespread. The “Declaration of Rights” that opened Pennsylvania’s radically democratic 1776 Constitution guaranteed citizens of the Commonwealth the right of “Acquiring,

Possessing, and Protecting Property,” but also declared that government existed for the

“Common Benefit, Protection, and Security of the People, Nation, or Community, and not for the particular Emmolument or advantage of any Single man.” The Declaration’s Sixteenth Article, narrowly rejected by the state convention, would have gone further, warning that “an enormous

Proportion of Property vested in a few Individuals is dangerous to the Rights, and destructive of the Common Happiness of Mankind.”36 During the debates over Ratification, Federalists and

Antifederalists largely agreed that (in the words of New England Federalist Noah Webster), “a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom.” Laws abolishing primogeniture and in the new states of North Carolina and Delaware contained explicit provisions declaring their purpose to be (in the words of North

Carolina’s law) “to promote that equality of property which is the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.”37

Democratic thinkers drew on such precedents to develop and elaborate the notion of the

“social debt,” the idea that large landowners and the wealthy were obligated by society to ensure that a proportionate share of the wealth went to the laboring or productive classes.38 The

Revolutionary War veteran and expatriate democrat Joel Barlow wrote that remaining aristocratic tendencies in society violated poor laborers’ natural to the extent of

36 An Essay of a Declaration of Rights (Philadelphia, 1776). 37 Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, Proposed by the Late Convention Held at Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1787), 47; quoted in James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 3; North Carolina and Delaware laws quoted in Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, 71. 38 Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 125; Gregory Claeys, “Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the Secularization of National Jurisprudence,” Bulletin of the Society for Labour History, Vol. 52, No. 3 (November 1987): 21–31. The following interpretation of the sources of agrarian thought in the early national period is deeply indebted to Cotlar’s work.

32 constituting a “war” against them; the solution was to utilize the concept of the social debt to spread property ownership more widely throughout society. Another democratically-inclined

Revolutionary veteran, the sailor and self-taught editor and librarian Robert Coram, looked to the inegalitarian divisions of property rooted in aristocratic institutions as the source of poverty, crime, and urban vice. Coram, who was later elected to revise the Delaware state constitution, seized on the English legal theorist William Blackstone’s injunction that the origins of property rights should not be “scrutinize[d] too nicely” to do just that in his 1791 pamphlet, Political

Inquiries. Artificial distinctions of property, Coram wrote, were “the fountain of all [the poor man’s] misery”; scenes of urban poverty and squalor in early American cities daily gave the lie to the boasted claims of “civilization.” One individual’s labor should rightfully “define the boundaries of possession”; in terms of land ownership at least, “a man has a right to as much land as he cultivates and no more.” Although Coram concluded that no “civilized community” could accept “an equal division of lands,” he insisted that “society should furnish the people with means of subsistence,” whether in land or by providing training in a trade. Such an approach,

Coram hoped, should become “an inherent quality in the nature of government, universal, permanent, and uniform.”39

It was Thomas Paine, the icon of democratic radicals throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world, who made perhaps the period’s strongest case for the redistribution of wealth.40 His final

39 Robert Coram, Political Inquiries; quoted in Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 117–19. Blackstone defined property in strict Lockeian terms as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercised over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 2. Elsewhere he made clear the social dangers of “scrutinizing [the origins of property] too nicely”: for “the law of in this country is now formed into a fine artificial system, full of unseen connections and nice dependencies, and he that breaks one link of the chain endangers the dissolution of the whole.” From Blackstone’s decision in Perrin v. Blake (1772), cited in David Sugarman and Ronnie Warrington, “, Citizenship, and the Invention of ‘Englishness’: The Strange World of the Equity of Redemption,” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 129. 40 As Eric Foner has rightfully pointed out, Paine’s agrarianism was tempered by his commitment to the sanctity of property rights and in a progressive, modernizing instinct that was in some ways ideologically congruent with emerging 33 work, Agrarian Justice, published in pamphlet form in 1797, was Paine’s parting gift to an

Anglo-American revolutionary tradition that had by that time largely abandoned him. Addressed to the “Legislature and the Executive Directory of the French Republic,” Agrarian Justice combined assumptions about a “natural right” to ownership of land or other productive property derived from the Bible, history, and Lockeian political thought with a theory of the social debt as a means to provide the remedy for unequal accumulations of property. Paine’s first major intellectual contribution in Agrarian Justice was his reconceptualization of poverty as the result of structural and environmental flaws in commercial “civilization,” rather than of a flawed character, as the conventional morality of the day held. “The great mass of the poor,” Paine argued, had “become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible for them to get out of that state themselves.” After pointedly declaring, as had Coram and others, his intention to ignore the

English common-law theorist William Blackstone’s injunction not to look too deeply into the origins of landed property, Paine located them in a theory of history derived from the Scottish

Enlightenment, which viewed the accumulation of landed property that followed the advent of agriculture as a signal event in human history. Like his contemporaries in England, the agrarian theorists William Ogilvie and Thomas Spence, Paine concluded that “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state” had once been “the COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE.”41

Paine built on John Locke’s labor theory of property to scrutinize the origins of landed property. It was only the addition of man’s labor, Paine argued, that gave legitimacy to the claims of property in land. Over time, the claim to ownership of the “improvements” to land had become “confounded” with a right to the land itself; “but they are nevertheless distinct species of

capitalism. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, updated ed., (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 94–95, 100, 105–06, 249–51. 41 Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, in M. Beer, ed., The Pioneers of Land Reform: Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Paine (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), 185, 194–99.

34 rights, and will continue to be so as long as the world endures.” All , Paine insisted,

is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make the land originally... All accumulation, therefore, of private property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.42

Whereas Locke had argued that individuals agreed to enter society and form for the purpose of protecting individual property, Paine, in calculating the social debt, discerned a corresponding obligation of on the part of individual property-holders to society. And yet he took care to preserve individual property rights, distinguishing between the more socialistic

“Agrarian Law” promoted by Ogilvie and Spence, which advocated an actual redistribution of land for the use of the poor, and his own “Agrarian Justice,” which maintained the rights of the possessor of land to “the part which is his”—the value added after the introduction of cultivation.

Paine’s solution involved the creation of a proposed “National Fund”—a sort of Social Security in reverse—out of which each person, regardless of wealth or status, would receive the sum of fifteen pounds upon reaching the age of maturity, “as a compensation in part for the loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property,” followed by annual payments of ten pounds per year up to the age of fifty. Under a republican form of government, Paine implied, people could regulate and redistribute property to better accord with

42 Ibid.

35 their sense of justice, fairness, and the natural right to life and liberty. “It is not charity but a right,” Paine insisted, “not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.” 43

With the impact of Agrarian Justice on the post-Revolutionary culture of the United

States appears to have been minimal, Paine’s influence on the radical artisan milieu that comprised a key component of the Democratic-Republican opposition in the early national period, as well as on the broader culture of the radical Atlantic World, far outlasted his fall from grace and descent into relative obscurity. Indeed, so persistent was his legacy that some scholars have described these groups as the bearers of a “Paineite” tradition. In New York, freethinking artisans and the city’s Democratic Society kept Paine’s ideas alive with annual celebrations of

Paine’s birthday, a tradition kept alive into the 1830s. The publication of Paine’s The Rights of

Man dovetailed with the radically egalitarian forces unleashed by the French and Haitian

Revolutions; Paine himself made the connection between popular revolution and antislavery explicit, framing the Revolution in France as a contest between “slavery and freedom.” Paine’s first published work, the essay African Slavery in America, appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser in 1775, and just weeks after its publication he joined Philadelphia’s

Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the precursor to the

Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS). Later, he may have drafted the preamble to

Pennsylvania’s 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.44

The associations between democratic freedom, natural rights, and antislavery contributed to another phenomenon of the 1790s: an unprecedented level of support for antislavery among

43 Paine, Agrarian Justice, in Beer, ed., Pioneers of Land Reform, 185, 194–99. Ogilvie and Spence also invoked Locke to defend the “natural rights” of the laboring poor. See Richard Ashcraft, “Lockean Ideas, Poverty, and the Development of Liberal Political Theory,” in Brewer and Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property, 52. 44 Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 70, 224, 335; Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). James V. Lynch has disputed Paine’s contributions to antislavery; see Lynch, “The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Tom Paine and Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123 (July, 1999), 177–99.

36 artisans, journeymen, and democratic editors and journalists in the North. Seth Cotlar has documented the change in attitudes expressed by democratically-inclined newspapers, even those, like the New-York Journal, that had previously demonstrated hostility to antislavery or mocked free blacks, after the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791. For enslaved people like Gabriel Prosser, a Richmond, Virginia blacksmith who worked side by side with white artisans and was thought by white Virginians to have imbued what one termed “the eternal clamour about liberty” from local white “jacobins” and “profligate and abandoned democrats,” such ideas could have “levelling” implications indeed. The enemies of Democratic-Republican

“jacobins,” meanwhile, were quick to capitalize on the association between natural rights egalitarianism, artisan radicalism, and antislavery: a satirical tract of the period depicted a

Democratic-Republican club, presided over by a cobbler, accepting a black man in its membership, a scenario its author attributed to the “leveling principles” espoused by the club. As

Thomas Hardy, a Philadelphia cordwainer, expressed it, Paine’s formulation of “the rights of all mankind” now applied to “the whole human race black or white, high or low, rich or poor.”45

The Labor Theory of Property and the Right to the “Fruits of Labor”

Paine denounced the injustices of slavery in terms that would have sounded familiar to both republican theorists and ordinary working Americans of the time. Enslaved people must not only be emancipated, Paine insisted, but allowed to enjoy “the fruits of their labor at their own

45 Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 56; [John S. J. Gardiner], Remarks on the Jacobiniad (Boston, 1795); cited in Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Riches and Honour Were Rejected By Them as Loathsome Vomit: The Fear of Leveling in New England,” in Carla Gardina, Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds. Inequality in Early America (Hanover, NH.: University Press of New England, 1999): 60–61; responses to Gabriel’s Rebellion quoted in Edward B. Rugemer,“Caribbean Slave Revolts and the Origins of the Gag Rule: A Contest Between Abolitionism and Democracy, 1787–1835,” in Mason, ed., Contesting Slavery, 94– 113. On the role of race and slavery in the Democratic-Republican coalition of the 1790s, see Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Consciousness: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), and David Waldstreicher and Stephen R. Grossbart, “Abraham Bishop’s Vocation: or, the Mediation of Jeffersonian Politics,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1998): 617–657. 37 disposal, and be encouraged to industry.”46 The idea that workers of all kinds had a right to “the fruits of their labor” was at the heart of the idea of “free labor” that would later become central to the abolitionist movement. But the concept of a right to the fruits of labor had much deeper roots in American society; indeed, the idea, and the social mobility it entailed, had been central to the basic promise of the Revolution. So exceptional was the phenomenon, goes the argument, of being able to use the rewards of labor to rise above one’s station in life that socially-mobile and relatively-equal white men in the North American colonies were willing to fight and die for it. In the post-Revolutionary period, the promise of social mobility remained only partially fulfilled; many small farmers and urban workers found their fortunes failed to improve; unskilled wage labor remained economically tenuous and marred by social stigma; indentured servants, immigrant “redemptioners,” and enslaved Africans sometimes worked side-by-side with free wage laborers; and debt-ridden farmers in western Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were driven to rebellion. But just as free labor had to be “invented” by the legal and political process of stripping away older forms of non-economic coercion (abolishing indentured servitude and specific performance, for example), so the process of an ideological construction of free labor began in the decades immediately following the Revolution.47

Somewhat ironically given the way that classical economic theory would later be marshaled in defense of a strict, laissez-faire interpretation of , two further ideas that would prove most important to the construction of free labor, in both its radical and bourgeois variants, had their origins in classical . Then and now, Lockeian notions of a

“natural right” to property have often been construed as his endorsement of an absolute right to

46 Paine, Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, 8 March 1775; quoted in Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 61–62. 47 Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution; Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor; Rockman, Scraping By

38 the same; and indeed, Locke himself viewed property rights as so essential to liberty that he suggested that individuals had the right to kill in defense of them. Defenses of property rights made in Lockeian terms were common throughout the Anglo-American world, but they were often qualified by considerations about the greater good or commonwealth. Even William

Blackstone, the period’s leading legal theorist on the origins of property rights, had defined them as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercised over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”48

In his Second Treatise, Locke made an equally important argument about the origin of property rights (alluded to above): all legitimate property, he said, was the result of prior labor.

When man mixed his labor with the products of nature, such as land, the resulting

“improvements” were “the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”49 From the labor theory of property, advocates of the rights of labor extrapolated the . In the Revolutionary and early national periods, artisans and labor reformers drew two important conclusions from this new construction of Lockeian thought. First, skilled workers in the period conceived of their labor—their craft knowledge and skill—in and of itself, as a form of property. Hence, the “ship carpenters, joiners, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, blockmakers, tanners, curriers, painters” and other workers that the Committee of Thirteen claimed to speak for during the price-control debates of 1779 enjoyed a property in their labor as sacrosanct as the merchants’ right to their ships—with all the attendant control over their labor that the rights of property implied. Second, since their labor was what imparted value to the

48 Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 2. 49 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Section 27; Richard Ashcraft, “Lockean ideas, poverty, and the development of liberal politcal theory.” In a further irony, the Cromwellian political economist William Petty, credited with being one of the earliest proponents of the philosophy of laissez-faire, had earlier developed a crude version of what became known as the “labor theory of value.”

39 finished product, it followed that workers were entitled to a full or proportionate share of the product’s value. Thus, in defending the striking journeyman cordwainers in 1806, defense attorney Walter Franklin argued that the journeymen “conceived that every man being the sole owner, and master of his own goods and labour, had a right to affix the price of them; leaving to those who were to employ or purchase the right to accept or reject as they might think.” To do otherwise would be to submit to the “slavish submission” demanded by masters.50

According to some interpretations, both the labor theory of property and the labor theory of value were widespread in the North American colonies in the years immediately preceding and following the Revolution.51 The Revolutionary veteran and farmer William Manning, despite his admission that he had not had “the advantage of six months schooling in my life,” sounded almost as if he was quoting Locke when he wrote in 1787 that “Labour is the sole parrant of all property... Therefore no person can posess property without labouring, unless he git it by force or craft, fraud or fortun out of the earnings of others.” Earlier, Benjamin Franklin had drawn on a version of the labor theory of value to argue that labor was the only true “Measure of Values”; since “the earth and the waters would be unproductive without labor... the labor of tillage is the first, and the labor of manufactures the second means of acquiring national and individual wealth.”52

Locke himself may have very well intended to argue against such a “civic,” conception of the public good in favor of an evolving liberal individualism more suited to the economic and

50 Commonwealth v Pullis, 1806, in John R. Commons and Eugene A. Gilmore, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. III, Labor Conspiracy Cases, 1806–1842, Volume 1 (Cleveland, Oh.: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), 110–11. 51 James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 7–19; Eva Sheppard Wolf, “Early Free Labor Thought and the Contest Over Slavery in the Early Republic,” in Mason, ed., Contesting Slavery, 32–48; Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 52 Manning, The Key of Libberty; Benjamin Franklin, A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, quoted in Schultz, Republic of Labor, 25.

40 moral imperatives of a commercial society. But in the egalitarian fervor that reverberated in the aftermath of the American Revolution, radical democrats like Manning, Barlow, and Coram drew conclusions from the labor theory of property that differed dramatically from the ways that defenders of absolute property rights, and perhaps Locke himself, had envisioned the Lockeian theory of property. Soon, transatlantic radicals like John Thelwall would go further, arguing that since an individual could not legitimately claim more property than can be created with his labor, any form of labor, like wage labor or slavery, that did not return “the whole product of labor” to the worker thereby robbed him of a portion of its value. Paine was making much the same point about the appropriation of surplus value when he observed in Agrarian Justice that “the accumulation of private property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labour that produced it.” Even Tench Coxe, a pro-manufacturing Federalist, seemed to agree that

“the poor, as they are wholly dependent on the rich for employment, so the rich have it always in their power to fix the price of the labour of the poor... the profitable parts of the labour of the poor are accumulated by the rich.”53

Adam Smith was another touchstone for developing ideas about the nature of labor and property. Just as they had with Lockeian notions of property, democratic radicals and labor spokesmen drew very different lessons from Adam Smith than the merchants who protested the actions of the Committee of Trade in 1779 by recourse to the tenets of laissez-faire. In the

Wealth of Nations, Smith not only argued for the sanctity of property, but added that one’s

53 Aurora and Weekly Advertiser, 29 January, 1807; Paine, Agrarian Justice, 25; “Citizen of the United States” [Tench Coxe], Observations on the Agriculture, Manufactures and Commerce of the United States in a Letter to a Member of Congress (New York, 1789), 78. Manning recommended the founding of a “Labouring Society,” for which he published a proposed constitution, as part of the “remidy” for redressing the conflict of interests between laborers and non-laborers. On Benjamin Franklin and labor, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 100-110. J.G.A. Pocock has suggested that for Locke, “the civic or participatory ideal had come to be expressed in terms of an agrarian mode of property acknowledged to exist mainly in the past... [in the liberal/bourgeois] shift towards [there was an] admission that in a commercial society the individual’s relation to his res publica could not be simply civic or virtuous.” Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 436.

41 ownership of his or her labor was in itself a “most sacred and inviolable” form of property, and further used this notion to argue for high wages as a way of ensuring that “they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.”54 Successive generations of labor reformers, notably the English Chartists, would pick up on this theme to make the case that working class “producers,” as a result of both their ownership of their labor and their role in the production of wealth, were uniquely entitled to both political representation and economic reward.55 Whereas incipient industrialists were delighted to see an endorsement of rational utility and increased productivity in Smith’s parable of the pin-factory, labor reformers gravitated to later passages in that lamented the effects of the division of labor on workers, in which Smith argued that the factory worker’s “dexterity at his own particular trade seems... to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and marital virtues.”56 Secondly,

Smith’s recognition of the conflict of interests between different groups in society—what some political economists and labor reformers would soon come to identify as between “producers” and “non-producers,” and between “labor” and “capital”—would, despite Smith’s assurances that such competing interests could be reconciled, provide an authoritative source for future arguments pointing out the structural conflicts that underlay industrial society.57

Smith is also famous, of course, for his free labor antislavery arguments based on his contentions about the relative inefficiency of slave labor. Smith’s argument about the inherent

54 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, 80, quoted in Margaret R. Somers, “The ‘misteries’ of property: Relationality, rural-industrialization, and community in Chartist narratives of political rights,” in Brewer and Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 27. 55 Somers, “The ‘misteries’ of property,” in Brewer and Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property, 28. 56 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol 3, p. 157. For the use of this line of argument by early labor reformers, see Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 144–45. 57 Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America, 145; Martin Burke, Conundrum of Class, 77, 116-17. For examples of the adoption of Smith’s ideas about the conflict of interests by labor reformers, see , Opinions on Various Subjects: Dedicated to the Industrial Producers (1831); William Leggett, Democratick Editorials.

42 superiority of free labor to slavery was tied to what he described as the lack of economic incentives for slaves in the form of ownership of property or wages. Since the slave was denied the fruits of his labor, he could “have no other interest than to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only...” By the time Smith wrote in 1776, such assumptions about the inefficiency and degradation of forced or coerced labor were already widespread, and they would have a similarly long genealogy. In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin had argued that slave labor was naturally inferior to free labor because “Neglect is natural to the

Man who is not to be benefitted by his own Care or Diligence.” A half-century later, another

Philadelphian reached similar conclusions from independent reasoning. Reflecting on the economic possibilities of the recent Louisiana Purchase, the Democratic-Republican editor

William Duane wrote to suggest that “three or four hundred white farmers with their families will produce more sugar than a negro estate with two thousand slaves.”58

What these Smithian free labor arguments had in common (aside from the fact that modern scholarship has proven many of their assumptions about the inefficiency and under- productivity of slave labor to have been unfounded) is that they viewed slavery over and above all as a system of labor rather than a property regime. In the nineteenth century, abolitionists, labor reformers, and others eager to demonstrate the inherent superiority of free labor over slavery would continue to make arguments based on a Smithian analysis that identified slavery as a system of labor and attempted to assess its productivity accordingly. Over time, this would

58 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, 411–412; quoted in Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 2; Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind...” (1751); William Duane quoted in Eva Sheppard Wolf, “Early Free Labor Thought and the Contest Over Slavery in the Early Republic,” in Mason, ed., Contesting Slavery, 32, 40. On Franklin’s understanding of the relationship between slavery and capitalism and its possible influence on Smith, see David Waldstreicher, “Capitalism, Slavery, and Benjamin Franklin’s American Revolution,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006): 183–216.

43 lead to the construction of a fully fleshed-out ideology of free labor, one of the major prongs in the antislavery arsenal, and the key to the Republican Party’s antislavery appeal.59 But it would also lead to irreconcilable contradictions and ambiguities, especially when taken up by reformers ultimately more concerned with the plight of free white workers than of enslaved Africans.

Early Labor Radicalism and the Ambiguities of Democratic-Republican Antislavery

The contradictions inherent in the labor approach to antislavery are amply demonstrated by the foremost figure to emerge as a spokesperson for the protean labor movement associated with Democratic-Republican radicals in Philadelphia, William Duane. Born in frontier New

York, Duane had grown up in his mother’s native Ireland before embarking on a career as a colonial administrator in India and then as a radical editor in London, where he became involved in the activities of Thelwall’s Corresponding Society. After arriving in Philadelphia in 1796, he quickly took over the editorship of the Aurora, the newspaper founded by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Bache. Referred to by Jefferson as the “rallying point for the Orthodox of the whole Union,” the Aurora soon became a semi-official organ of the Democratic-Republican opposition, and later of the radical wing of the party of Jefferson. During the journeymen shoemaker’s strike and trial for conspiracy in 1805–06, the Aurora was the only Philadelphia newspaper to support the strike—a fact which did not escape the notice of the prosecuting attorney in the case, who accused Duane of attempting “to poison the public mind” in favor of the strikers.60

59 Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development; Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 347–53. For an example of how abolitionists in a later period utilized Smith’s economic arguments against slavery, see Julius Rubens Ames and Benjamin Lundy, The Legion of Liberty!: And Force of Truth, Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds of Some Apostles, Champions and Martyrs, (New York: American Anti- Slavery Society, 1842). 60 Schultz, Republic of Labor, 153–54; Commons, Documentary History, III:1, 67.

44

Throughout Duane’s tenure as editor, the Aurora’s columns were notable for two consistent themes: a critique of the declining status of “producers,” and jeremiads about the pernicious effects of industrial development in England (often tinctured with doses of

Anglophobia, perhaps calculated to appeal to Irish-American readers). In a series of essays written between January and March of 1807 and titled “Politics for Farmers and Mechanics,”

Duane affirmed his commitment to a republican understanding of the commonwealth, reminding readers that among the “ends for which society is instituted” was “the promotion of the happiness of the whole or the greatest number.” Since “those who acquire support from labor” comprised the largest portion of the population, those policies which ensured the happiness of the laboring majority “must prevail.” Decidedly not included among these policies, for

Democratic-Republicans like Duane, were Hamiltonian financial innovations such as a paper currency, a central banking system, or the creation of chartered corporations.61

Neither, by Duane’s lights, could the persistence of slave labor be tolerated. It was

“absurd,” wrote an Aurora correspondent (possibly Duane himself), to imagine that “FREEDOM and SLAVERY can exist long in the same country.” Earlier, Duane had condemned George

Washington for continuing to hold “FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN

SLAVERY,” and elsewhere, he wrote that “the slavery of man is abhorrent to every noble and honorable feeling,” and insisted that “a black African is as much entitled to the rights of humanity, and liberty, and benevolence as any white person.”62 In terms of a solution to the problem of slavery’s continued existence, Duane agreed with Jefferson that the “diffusion” of enslaved people “over a greater extent of country” would mean that slavery’s expansion would

61 Aurora, December 23, 1806; January 7, 9, 1807; Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, 74. 62 Jasper Dwight [William Duane], “A Letter to , President of the United States...” (Philadelphia, 1796), 46–48; Aurora, 24 Sept 1800; Aurora 23 Dec 1806. In true partisan fashion, and much less credibly, Duane insisted in the same pages that his idol, Thomas Jefferson’s “whole life has been marked by measures calculated to procure the emancipation of the blacks.”

45 be “checked by” the spread of free white labor. While the continued access to readily available lands, made possible by Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, was key to the gradual demise of slavery, Duane also suggested racial intermixing—what its detractors called “amalgamation”— as a possible solution to the “problem” of race and slavery in the early republic. 63

At the same time, Duane occasionally made statements that revealed his affinity with the prevailing racism of the time; and even his antislavery commitments seemed to ebb and flow with the tides of Democratic-Republican party fortunes. For much of the second decade of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the , he had appeared willing to jettison his antislavery convictions for the sake up upholding first the Democratic-Republican coalition between southern slaveholders and northern small producers, and later national unity during the war.64 He was also an early and enthusiastic adopter of the term “white slavery” to refer to oppressed free laborers. Referring to the striking shoemakers of 1805–06, Duane suggested that if skilled laborers lost control over the price of their services and were forced to compete in a market for wages, the result would be the creation of “a breed of white slaves... nursed up in poverty to take the place of the blacks upon their emancipation.” Duane, however, like Abraham

Bishop and other Jeffersonians in the period, utilized the language of “white slavery” both to

63 On contemporary ideas about racial intermixing, or “amalgamation,” as a solution to the “problems” of race and slavery, see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Book, 2016). For a view on Duane’s thinking on race and slavery that differs somewhat from my interpretation, see Padraig Griffin Riley, “Northern Republicans and Southern Slavery: Democracy in the Age of Jefferson, 1800–1819” (PhD Diss, 2007), 204 and passim, as well as the more recent Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Riley argues that Duane’s “whiteness” facilitated an “affective relationship” with slaveholders that was instrumental in forging the alliance between northern and southern Democratic- Republicans. See also Duane’s “Letter to Jefferson” in the Aurora, 18 February 1803; K. T. Phillips, William Duane: Radical Journalist in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 537 . 64 See Duane to Jefferson, 7 Jan 1802, in Letters of William Duane. Duane’s racism appears to have been predicated on the idea that blacks’ inferiority was the product of their “condition” as slaves rather than inherent characteristics ascribable to all Africans. His most blatantly racist statement on record, contained in a private letter to Thomas Jefferson, was made in the context of an argument for the use of black soldiers in the War of 1812; elsewhere in the same letter, Duane praised the patriotism of African Americans and spoke of the contributions of “Africans of highly cultivated minds.”

46 critique chattel bondage and rail against the “invisible” slavery that plagued downtrodden workers or victims of Federalist tyranny in New England.65

Duane’s equivocations on slavery, moreover, came to a head during the first major challenge faced by the nation over the expansion of slavery into what had been formerly public lands. The Missouri Crisis of 1819–21 pitted two very different visions of Jeffersonian agrarianism against one another, one that demanded, in the words proslavery Virginian John

Randolph, the recognition of “the right of property between the master and his slave,” and another in which, in the words of New York restrictionist James Tallmadge, the land was

“inhabited by the hardy sons of American freemen... owners of the soil on which they live.” In the debates over the Missouri Crisis, New York Republican John W. Taylor evoked Henry

Clay’s unfavorable comparison between “the ‘white slaves’ of the North” and the “’black slaves’ of Kentucky” as an example of slaveholders’ hostility towards “laboring men.”66 In the end, southerners were able to leverage the power of the three-fifths clause and pull just enough northern votes in the House to effect the Missouri Compromise, which allowed the entry of

Missouri as a slave state and drew a line across the remaining territories at 36°30’.

As historians Sean Wilentz and, most recently, Padraig Riley have pointed out, the

Missouri Crisis both signaled the demise of the Jeffersonian coalition between northern and southern Democratic-Republicans, and anticipated the free soil arguments later adopted by the party of Lincoln. But in some ways, the antislavery constituency represented by the radical

Duane wing of the Democratic-Republican Party went far beyond the restrictionism of

Tallmadge or the legalistic antislavery of the elite Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In the Aurora,

65 Aurora, December 23, 1806; January 7, 9, 1807; Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth, 74; Waldstreicher and Grossbart, “Abraham Bishop’s Vocation,” 630–31, 647–50. 66 Randolph quoted in Annals of Congress, 13th Cong., 1st Sess., 1115; Tallmadge quoted in Annals of Congress, 15th, Cong., 2nd Sess., (February, 1819), 1206; Taylor in Ibid., 1177.

47

William Duane reminded readers that slavery was “repugnant to the very nature of our government,” and demanded that its expansion “be arrested, and means should be adopted for its speedy and gradual abolition—for its utter extinction.” The Aurora now advocated the position that whites and blacks were equal under the law and “in the eye of the creator,” and Duane’s protégé, Stephen Simpson, took to its pages under the pseudonym “Brutus” to attack southern politicians and their northern collaborators. Both Duane and Simpson, who in the next decade would emerge as a leader of the Philadelphia Working Men’s Party, now helped to elect the anti- extensionist Joseph Heister to the governorship and endorsed former Federalist DeWitt Clinton against President James Monroe, whom they blamed for the passage of the Missouri bill. If the

Missouri Crisis and its aftermath demonstrated that the political coalition between northern and southern “producers” could only be stretched so far, it also suggests that radical advocates of the rights of labor and of freedom of the public lands were in the front ranks of those ready to jump ship when the exigencies of sectional and partisan politics demanded a capitulation to proslavery extensionism.67

Perhaps most importantly, the passage of the Missouri Compromise marked both the demise of old radical strategies and allegiances and provided the impetus for the creation of new ones. Much as the radical possibilities of the 1790s had been eclipsed by the moral and political compromises demanded by the partisan and sectional loyalties of the era of Democratic-

Republican hegemony, hopes for the imminent abolition of slavery appeared to grow dim with the victory of proslavery expansionism in the Missouri Compromise. As both slavery and a form of market-based capitalism grew over the next decade, enabled by enhanced legal and political protections for the private ownership of land and human beings, those who clung to an older

67 Padraig Riley, Slavery and the Democratic Consciousness: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 215, 223-24, 235 and passim.

48 tradition that subordinated private property rights to the res publica would find themselves relegated to ever-smaller spaces of resistance. But this very attenuation of possibilities opened the doors to the creation of yet more radical solutions to the problems posed by the continued coexistence of slavery and free labor. Once again in the 1820s, the bearers of the agrarian tradition would turn to the land for the solution to what they increasingly viewed as an intrinsic hostility between capital and labor. The puzzle over the place of slavery in this equation would once again trouble the efforts to establish independent free labor and freedom of the soil, and spark imaginative if ultimately unsuccessful approaches whose successes and failures would provide important lessons for the antislavery and labor movements of subsequent decades.

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Chapter Two “The Soul of the Plan Contemplated”: New Harmony, Nashoba, and Owenite Reform in the 1820s

Owenite Socialism on the Antislavery Frontier

When Frances Wright arrived at New Harmony, Indiana, in the spring of 1825, she was struck by a newfound sense of possibility. As she recalled in a letter to friends at home in Britain, upon first encountering the 800-person-strong community founded by Welsh industrialist Robert

Owen, “a vague idea crossed me that there was something in the system of united labor as there in operation w[hi]ch m[igh]t be rendered subservient to the emancipation of the South.” For

Wright, the cooperative labor practices she observed at New Harmony suggested an answer to a seemingly-intractable problem, one that had haunted her throughout her American sojourn— what Wright called “the crying sin of slavery.” Since “the effects of united labor” at New

Harmony were so “greatly exceeding those of individual labor,” Wright recalled later, “it then occurred to me that if individual labor c[oul]d not stand in competition with united labor in a free state how much less c[oul]d it do so within the regions of slavery.”1

In the months to come, Wright would develop a plan for a cooperative settlement on the banks of the Wolf River in Tennessee (dubbed “Nashoba” following the Native American term for the place), that would serve as a sort of halfway house between slavery and freedom, where enslaved people would be given instruction in mental and manual labor, work and live communally, and be prepared for freedom after their had “redeemed” the cost of their purchase through labor. The cooperative practices of the Rappites, the community’s original German

1 Frances Wright to Julia Garnett, 8 June 1825, in Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, ed., “The Nashoba Plan for Removing the Evils of Slavery: Letters of Frances and Camilla Wright, 1820–1829,” Harvard Library Bulletin 23 (July 1975): 288–29.

51 founders, “together with the system now commenced by Mr Owen,” Wright believed, represented “the only scheme w[hi]ch I believe capable of being rendered general & consequently efficient in its effects.” As Wright made clear elsewhere, she hoped that Nashoba would serve as an example to slaveholders and abolitionists alike of the practicability of emancipation, gradually leading to the complete eradication of slavery. Although the plan taking shape in Wright’s mind contained elements of the other major approaches to emancipation that predominated in the 1820s—voluntary manumission, colonization, or the purchase of enslaved people’s freedom by emancipation societies—the plan taking shape in Wright’s mind presented a holistic and comprehensive solution to the problem of the persistence of slavery.2

For Wright, the connection between antislavery and cooperative free labor was obvious, even self-evident. As an ardent believer in a radical variant of , Wright believed, along with many professed democrats, that slavery represented almost the sole stain on the nation’s otherwise spotless escutcheon—a “plague spot,” she called it. But unlike

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who despaired of his ability to wipe clean the evidence of his sin, Wright seemed to believe that the stain of slavery could be wiped away almost effortlessly, if only slaveholders, capitalists, free laborers, and enslaved people themselves could be persuaded to recognize their own interest in abolishing slavery. And unlike her hero Jefferson, who shortly before his death proclaimed that a “Revolution in public opinion” would be necessary before slavery could be eradicated, Wright was not content to wait for the tides of public opinion or the of the free market to consign slavery to history’s dustbin.

2 Frances Wright to Julia Garnett, Philadelphia 8 June 1825, in Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, ed., “The Nashoba Plan for Removing the Evils of Slavery: Letters of Frances and Camilla Wright, 1820–1829,” Harvard Library Bulletin 23 (July 1975), 239, 241–42. Although Wright’s letter is addressed to Julia Garnett, she repeatedly refers to “Harry,” probably Harriet Garnett, Julia’s sister. The Garnetts were a politically liberal English family that had emigrated to New Brunswick, New Jersey, but moved frequently between the United States, Britain, and France; throughout her life, Wright cultivated an extremely close relationship with the two sisters. See Payne-Gaposchkin, ed., “The Nashoba Plan,” 221–22; Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 36–37.

52

Branded an intolerably dangerous radical in her time—perhaps as much for her views on abolition and racial “amalgamation” as for her advocacy of women’s rights and religious

“infidelity”—Wright’s views on marriage, reproductive rights, labor, and education strike historians today as far in advance of their time. An energetic reformer who combined an enviable

Enlightenment pedigree with a transplanted European’s fervent enthusiasm for America’s republican experiment, Wright expected to effect Jefferson’s “Revolution in public opinion” almost single-handedly. The instrument, she hoped, would be an Owenite-inspired community established for the purpose of the instruction and emancipation of enslaved laborers. The

Nashoba community, named for the Chickasaw word for the Wolf River in Tennessee that

Wright chose as the site for the experiment, marked the period’s only significant attempt to directly apply the cooperative and communitarian principles then being pursued by labor reformers to the problem of slavery.3

The origins of the Nashoba community, its spectacular failure, and its place in the interstices between free labor and abolitionism, can only be understood in the context of the assumptions guiding both labor reform and antislavery in the 1820s. Central to the former—and more than merely tangential to the latter—was the enthusiasm for utopian community-building, largely generated by one man, the Welsh-born factory owner and philanthropist Robert Owen.

Born in 1771 in Newtown, , as a young man Owen gained international renown as the manager of , a “factory village” on the River Clyde in that eventually grew to employ some 2,000 workers. A product of religious skepticism and Enlightenment rationalism, Owen was eager to test his belief that human beings were the products of their environment rather than of original sin or some inherent defect of character. At New Lanark,

3 Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 87.

53

Owen applied his theories of “management on principles of justice and kindness,” increasing wages, reducing the hours of labor from fourteen to twelve hours a day, encouraging education, and establishing a contributory fund to provide for workers in the case of injury or sickness and in old age. But beginning in the early teens, Owen began to develop ideas that transcended the benevolent paternalism practiced at New Lanark. Particularly after his recommendations to the

Select Committee in Parliament for a bill promoting “industrial emancipation” were rejected, resulting in a watered-down Factory Act of 1819, Owen began to embrace a more comprehensive plan for the emancipation of labor, one that would completely re-orient the emerging industrial society away from the destructive competition and long hours of harsh toil that characterized the lives of industrial workers.4 The plan for what Owen labeled “the rational system of society” began in earnest with the publication of his A New View of Society, published as a series of essays beginning in 1813. The New View systematically elucidated the problems caused by mechanization, competition, and relentless -seeking, and argued that the solution to these problems lay in a sweeping change in the very structure of society, far beyond the scope of what could be accomplished by legislation or political reform. That solution was to be found in organized “villages of union” of between 500 and 1,500 workers, situated in the countryside but utilizing the latest industrial technology to ensure self-sufficiency. Under Owen’s brand of

“socialism”—as he and his followers were calling their system by the 1820s—workers would hold property in common while continuing to live in private dwellings; they would be paid in

“labour notes” based on labor time as the standard value for reward; all would become

4 The 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act, while an early and unprecedented parliamentary intervention into the sphere of private industry, also allowed the employment of children as young as nine, who might be compelled to work a twelve-hour day. Regardless of its intentions or shortcomings, the Act was ineffectively enforced, leading to calls for more legislation. See Claeys, ed., A New View of Society and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), xii–xiii.

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“producers,” sharing in the burdens of labor but availing themselves of the advantages of machinery, which Owen believed could reduce the hours of labor to as little as five hours a day.5

In some ways, the embrace of Owenite “socialism” by American workingmen and labor reformers in the 1820s was a response to the dearth of political alternatives created by the advent of one-party rule during the so-called “era of good feelings.”6 Owen’s “Declaration of Mental

Independence,” delivered on July 4th, 1826, in the Public Hall at New Harmony, combined an homage to Jefferson’s original with an attack on private property, received religion, and traditional marriage and a Benthamite injunction “to secure for all your fellow-beings, the

GREATEST GOOD that, according to our present knowledge, it is possible for them ever to receive.”7 The speech marked not only the fiftieth anniversary since the adoption of the 1776

Declaration, but was delivered on the same day as the passing, within hours of one another, of both Jefferson and his old rival, John Adams. In the quarter-century since Jefferson’s election to the Presidency, the competing philosophies of government they represented had crystallized and hardened into a blend of consensus and stalemate. In Philadelphia, the fiercely democratic, pro- labor circle that had coalesced around William Duane’s Aurora now found themselves branded as “Old School” Republicans, threatened with eclipse by a group of pro-business “New

Schoolers.” With the eclipse of Jeffersonian radicalism and the capture of the Democratic-

5 Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 163; “View of New-Harmony,” New-Harmony Gazette, I, 30 (22 October, 1825). 6 Bestor’s Backwoods Utopias remains the best account of Owenite communities in the United States. On Owen’s influence on the labor movement in both Britain and the U.S., see Kenneth E. Carpenter, ed., British Labour Struggles: Contemporary Pamphlets 1727–1850: and the Working Class (New York: Arno Press, 1972); E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 779–806; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 162–66, 176–77. 7 Robert Owen, “A Declaration of Mental Independence,” New-Harmony Gazette, 12 July 1826, Vol I, Issue 42. On the Owenites’ pursuit of human happiness, see the “Third Essay” of Owen’s A New View of Society (1813–16), in Claeys, ed., A New View of Society, 53–56; Articles of Agreement... London Cooperative Society (London, 1825), 3; Cooperative Magazine I (1826), 3–5. Owenites sometimes quoted the Utilitarian philosopher ’s contention that the goal of society should be to provide “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” On the influence of Jeremy Bentham’s ideas about utilitarian happiness, see J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (London: Routledge 1969), 48–49. Bentham was a partner in Owen’s New Lanark mills.

55

Republican Party by pro-business moderates and proslavery expansionists, many labor spokesmen and ordinary workers began to look elsewhere to effect the reforms they desired.

After the revival of manufacturing and of trade with Great Britain after the War of 1812, workers found themselves thrust into a competitive market for wage labor, many for the first time, while others found themselves deskilled by changes in the processes of production, such as the division of labor, that marked the advent of industrialization long before the appearance of mechanized factories. The ensuing Panic of 1819 confirmed radical Jeffersonians’ worst fears about speculation, banks, and other instruments associated with the financialization of the economy that accompanied the spread of market relationships. Meanwhile, the expansion of the franchise and other democratic reforms, which had once seemed irrepressible, remained stalled in states like Virginia, Connecticut, , and South Carolina, while the series of events surrounding the Missouri Crisis of 1819–20 not only demonstrated the intransigence of the

“slave problem” but provided alarming evidence of slaveholders’ determination to expand and an equally strong determination on the part of politicians—North and South, National Republican and Democratic Republican—to keep the issue of slavery out of politics.8

Even before Owen’s arrival on American shores in November, 1825, the transatlantic dispersion of Owenite ideas had become enmeshed in the reform vision of labor leaders and radical democrats, even if only a tiny minority of workingmen ever became direct participants in the formation of Owenite communities. Although Owen’s early works were addressed to elite

Britons like the Prince Regent and the abolitionist William Wilberforce, it was William Duane’s

Aurora, the pro-labor journal now in its third decade and still edited by the fiery Jeffersonian, that first published Owen’s seminal A New View of Society in the United States, running its

8 Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 181–217; 218–53; Schultz, Republic of Labor; Baptist; Riley; Ratcliffe; others on Missouri? Joshua M. Zeitz, “The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of Free Labor,” JER 20 (Fall 2000) 451–53.

56 essays in serial beginning in 1817.9 Even earlier, homegrown works like James Reynolds’

Equality: A Political Romance, published serially in the Temple of Reason in 1802, had helped prepare the ground for the reception of Owenite ideas in America by imagining a workers’ utopia in which both money and wage labor had been abolished, land was held in common, and workers enjoyed a four-hour workday.10

Throughout the period, an influx of English-speaking immigrants from the skilled trades brought about a re-injection of radical ideas being developed across the Atlantic, helping to disseminate the works of political philosophers and political economists like John Gray, William

Thompson, John Francis Bray, Thomas Spence, and . Both by accident and design, these thinkers became associated with Owenite socialism in the minds of American labor reformers. The radical English political economist John Gray, for example, was influenced more by Thomas Malthus and than by Robert Owen, and although he modestly proclaimed his plan inferior to Owen’s, he had no institutional ties to Owenite organizations in

Britain, and his thinking on economics was rather more sophisticated than that of most Owenites.

But the American edition of Gray’s A Lecture on Human Happiness, added a “Preamble and

Constitution of the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests,” to be located in Valley Forge,

Pennsylvania, patterned after the “Articles of Agreement” of the London Co-Operative Society, which had been tacked on to the London edition of Gray’s work.11 One of Owen’s most

9 Claeys, ed., A New View of Society, 1–10; Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 96, n 9. The Aurora articles may no longer be extant; its publication, in serial, of A New View of Society is described in Thomas Branagan, The Pleasures of Contemplation (2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1818). 10 Equality was published in the Temple of Reason, a Deist weekly published by another radical Irish immigrant, Denis Driscoll, in 1802. Reynolds and Duane, both associated with Irish immigrants despite Duane’s American birth, were the first figures prosecuted under the Sedition Act in 1799. See Schultz, Republic of Labor, 201–03. 11 John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness, To Which Is Added a Preamble and Constitution of the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests, to be Located in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (Philadeliphia: J. Coates, Jr., 1826). Gray rather modestly declared that the plan for the replacement of competitive capitalism by cooperation was inferior to Owen’s, but apologized by suggesting that “too many modifications of the same fundamental principles cannot be laid before the public; for out of each something advantageous may perhaps be selected.” The Scottish-born Owenite William Maclure later credited Gray 57 prominent collaborators in the United States, the Scottish-born scientist and education reformer

William Maclure, would later credit Gray with having awakened class consciousness among

American artisans and small producers; and the Philadelphia printer Langton Byllesby quoted

Gray’s Lecture in his influential Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth.12

Other native-born laborites promoted similar ideas, combining an agrarian assault on landed property with various schemes to re-organize labor in cooperative communities. In New York, the Society for Promoting Communities commissioned Cornelius Blatchly to write an exposition of its beliefs; the resulting Essay on Common Wealths argued that property in land had been given by God for “general use and benefit and not for individual aggrandizement” and called for the abolition of inheritance and the organization of “pure and perfect communities” of mechanics and farmers. The New York Society, composed largely of master artisans and journeymen, would be among the first to welcome Robert Owen upon his arrival in America in late 1825.13

A committed minority of urban workingmen left jobs, homes, and families to organize communities, often in remote locales miles away from the “civilization” embodied by the emerging manufacturing cities of the Atlantic seaboard and trans-Appalachian West.

Communities influenced or directly inspired by Owenite ideas included the aforementioned

Valley Forge Community, formed by workingmen and freethinkers from Philadelphia and

Wilmington, Delaware; the Franklin Community in Haverstraw, New York, organized by a

with awakening class consciousness among Philadelphia’s artisans and small producers; see Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 129. Gray, Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray have sometimes been lumped together into the disputed category of “Ricardian socialists”; see Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911). 12 Schultz, Republic of Labor, 214; Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 129; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 164, fn 34. Byllesby apparently encountered Gray’s work in New York City, where he moved sometime in the mid-1820s. 13 Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 55, 100, 202-5, 223–26; Appendix, 279–80; “Constitution of the Valley Forge Community,” (Appendix to John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness, Philadelphia, 1826); “To Industrious Mechanics who possess small Available Capitals,” Mechanics’ Free Press, May 29, 1829 (see also May 22, 1830, May 29, 5 June, 12 June 1830, and scattered issues); Langton Byllesby, Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth (New York, 1826), 25; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 159–60.

58 group of New York City freethinkers (including a number of English immigrants); the

Forestville Community, near Coxsackie, New York; and the Friendly Association for Mutual

Interests at Kendal, Ohio. In , the influence of Swedenborgian and Shaker religious thought, the organization of the Coal Creek community in nearly southwest Ohio, and the propaganda of the New York Society for Promoting Communities all paved the way for

Owen’s enthusiastic reception by local workingmen when he visited the city in December, 1824.

The formation of an Owenite Society in March 1825 was followed by the organization of the

Yellow Springs Community in Greene County, Ohio, later that year. In , Benjamin

Bakewell, a leading glass manufacturer, organized a Cooperating Society that published its own constitution and sent a committee to look for a likely spot for the establishment of a community.

Frederick W. Evans, the brother of Working Man’s Advocate editor (and later land reformer)

George Henry Evans, had likewise scouted locations for the Kendal Community before converting to Shakerism sometime in the mid-1820s.14

Key to the appeal of Owenism to American reformers and laborers in the 1820s was its congruence with the agrarian thought so central to antebellum labor reform. Owenite thinkers in the United States combined older notions about community, cooperative labor, and republican independence with a modern critique of the relations of labor under a nascent industrial capitalism. Merging the widespread desire for land and the gravitational allure of the West with high-minded ideas about the redistribution of property and the superiority of free labor, Owenite reform held a strong attraction not only for the minority of workers who actually left eastern

14 Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 55, 100, 202-15, 223–26; Appendix, 279–80; Cincinnati Emporium, 8 July, 16 December, 1824; Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette, 16 November 1824; 8 March 1825; 3 June 1825; Cincinnati Literary Gazette, III, 86, 154–56, 161-63; 190, 193–94, 214, 245 (12 March, 14 and 21 May, 11 and 18 June, 2 and 30 July, 1825); New Harmony Gazette, I, 71, 159, 310 (23 Nov 1825, 8 Feb and 21 July 1826). Although the Pittsburgh community never got off the ground, Bakewell’s nephew, Thomas Pears, went on to live at New Harmony and, with his wife, to write one of the most valuable accounts of the endeavor. See Donald McDonald, Diaries; Thomas and Sarah Pears, New Harmony: An Adventure in Happiness (Papers of Thomas and Sarah Pears (New Harmony, IN: Indiana Historical Society, 1933). On Frederick Evans, see Autobiography of a Shaker (Glasgow, 1888).

59 cities to form Owenite communities, but for the thousands more who read extracts and reformulations of Owenite thought in workingmen’s newspapers, debated them in meetings or workingmen’s reading rooms and lecture halls, and flocked to hear speeches by figures like Owen, his son Robert Dale Owen, and their collaborator Frances Wright.15

If Owenism resonated with already-established ideas about free labor, community, and the distribution of landed property, the embrace of Owen as a labor leader is somewhat harder to fathom. The son of an ironmonger and saddler, Owen embodied the ideal of the self-made manufacturer of the early industrial period, when master artisans could and frequently did become successful owners of capital. But Owen’s unusual success and wealth placed him at a far remove from the small masters and artisan-manufacturers that still typified American industry, and in his social circles and early promotional efforts he seemed to identify more with the rising class of industrial capitalists in Britain and with the aristocracy he sought to convert to his reforms than with the “lower orders,” as Owen frequently referred to them.16 Moreover, his approach to labor reform at both New Lanark and New Harmony was decidedly paternalistic. At

New Lanark, Owen continued to employ some 500 children as young as ten years old, apprenticed from a local workhouse, and used a system of color-coded “silent monitors,” wooden blocks suspended above individual workers to publicly measure their productivity. He rejected political reforms and the expansion of the franchise to workers, and only embraced trades unionism after becoming the de facto leader of Britain’s largest national trades union in the 1830s.

15 Claeys, ed., A New View of Society, 1–10; Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 96, n 9. The Aurora articles may no longer be extant; its publication, in serial, of A New View of Society is described in Thomas Branagan, The Pleasures of Contemplation (2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1818). 16 Gregory Claeys, “Introduction” to Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, vii–xiii. New Lanark became famous not only for the innovations applied to its labor force, but for the fine quality of its cotton thread. According to Claeys, Owen’s reputation among his workers as a benevolent employer was sealed after he refused to lower wages during the U.S. embargo on cotton during 1806–07 (Claeys, ix). 60

More paradoxical still was Owen’s relationship to slavery. Although Owen himself rarely emphasized chattel slavery—focusing instead on the “mental slavery” imposed by ignorance and religious superstition and the “white slavery” of poor factory workers in Britain—most British

Owenites seem to have considered moral opposition to slavery a foregone conclusion. Owen dedicated the first volume of New Moral World to the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, about whom he believed that no one “appears to have more nearly adopted in practice the principles which this Essay develops than yourself.” Elsewhere, he declared that in the cooperative society of the future “there shall be no human slavery, servitude or inequality of condition, except the natural inequality of age and inexperience.” And yet Owen’s business interests, indeed his very rise to prominence, were built upon a foundation of slave-grown cotton.

Owen’s first manufacturing venture had been a factory that made cotton-spinning equipment; his

New Lanark factory had imported the first bales of Sea Island cotton produced by South Carolina slaves into Britain. New Lanark was famed not only for its innovations in the treatment of workers but for the fine quality of its cotton thread, and Owen’s reputation as a benevolent paternalist had been sealed after he refused to reduce wages during the U.S. embargo of 1806–

07, despite its impact on the price and supply of cotton.17 Owen’s arrival in the United States coincided with a cotton boom made possible by the work of enslaved laborers; in the decade

1820–1830 alone, the production of slave-grown cotton in the United States nearly doubled, while the U.S. share of world cotton production grew to 43 percent.18

Nonetheless, Owen and his followers helped to popularize a notion that would eventually form the basis of much antislavery and related social thought: that the moral, spiritual, and

17 Gregory Claeys, “Introduction” to Robert Owen, A New View of Society and Other Writings, vii–xiii. 18 “Table 4.1,” in Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 114.

61 intellectual degradation that contemporaries associated with both poverty and slavery were the products of structural and environmental forces, not of character flaws in the individual. As

Owen and his followers put it repeatedly over the next decades, man’s “character is formed for him, not by him.” Dogmatic and deterministic as Owen’s understanding of human character formation could be, this central insight had important implications for the way his followers thought about the condition of society’s less fortunate, such as the urban poor and the enslaved.

Such ideas also dovetailed readily with assumption, common among antislavery whites and others who considered themselves progressive on issues of slavery and race, that the presumed inferiority of African Americans, like that of factory operatives in Manchester or unskilled Irish immigrant laborers in New York, was conditional rather than inherent, a product of the degradation they experienced under slavery.19 This outlook was underlined and complemented by the Owenite commitment to the universalistic of the Enlightenment, as well as to a kind of early internationalism, both of which were captured in the name of a later Owenite organization, the “Association of All Classes of All Nations.”20 Regardless of how consistently

Owen and his followers acted on the implications of their conclusions about human nature, the

Owenite insistence on environment as the determiner of social conditions was one important component of a larger intellectual shift towards sociological and secular understandings of social difference, one that represented a major cognitive step away from both religion-based equations

19 For the impact of “” on antislavery thought in the Revolutionary and Early National periods, see Paul J. Polgar, “ ‘To Raise Them to an Equal Participation’: Early National Abolitionism, Gradual Emancipation, and the Promise of African American Citizenship,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (Summer 2011), 229–258; Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, 2002), 1–169. For the attribution of racial characteristics to “degradation” and condition by white liberals in the period, see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 6–7, 24–26, and passim. 20 The “Association,” so named after a reorganization in May 1835, became the central Owenite organization in England after Owen left the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in late 1834. See Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, 218.

62 of poverty with sin and racially-deterministic views of black inferiority as inherent and essential.21

Owen did not leave slavery behind when he left the textile mills of Scotland for the plains of Indiana, where in 1824 he decided to establish New Harmony. Indeed, the origins of New

Harmony itself were deeply intertwined with the struggles over the expansion of slavery and ideas about free labor that had played out in the new states of the Old Northwest in the years immediately preceding his arrival. Owen’s purchase of the New Harmony land and buildings from the Rappites was negotiated with the assistance of George Flower and Morris Birkbeck, two residents of the village of Albion, a settlement of “farm-labourers... mechanics, and tradesmen from various parts of England” on the Illinois side of the who had emigrated to the region beginning in 1818. The residents of the “English settlement,” and Flower in particular, would prove instrumental in the struggle to determine whether the future of the region belonged to slavery or free labor.22

While Owen was preparing for his journey to New York and making arrangements for the purchase of New Harmony, an effort was underway in neighboring Illinois to overturn that state’s anti-slavery constitution. Following the precedent established by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, both Indiana and Illinois had banned slavery in their state constitutions in 1816 and

1818, respectively. However, Article IV of the Illinois constitution explicitly provided for the use of long-term indentures, while Article VI, Section 2 permitted year-long extensions for the use of

21 Gregory Claeys, ed., Robert Owen, A New View of Society (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991; originally published London, 1813–17), 1, 43. The quote on character formation is from John Finch, a delegate from the First Liverpool Cooperative Society, to the Third Co-Operative Congress, held in London in 1832. “Proceedings of the Third Co-Operative Congress (London, 1832), 12. On the “white slavery” of factory work, see Robert Owen, Address to the Operative Manufacturers and Agricultural Laborers in Great Britain and Ireland (n.p., 1830); An Address to the Master Manufacturers of Great Britain on the Present Existing Evils in the Manufacturing System (Bolton, 1819). 22 According to Arthur Bestor, “the slavery issue was what first aroused the reforming zeal of the English settlers” in Illinois. Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 49. Although Bestor describes George Flower’s role in the Nashoba experiment, his account does not go into detail regarding the antislavery activities of Flower or the English settlers in the region.

63

“bound labor” of African Americans at the state’s salt-works, the Gallatine Saline, near

Shawneetown. Meanwhile, migrants from bordering Kentucky and other slaveholding states had settled in the southern counties of both Illinois and Indiana, sometimes bringing their slaves with them in defiance of the state constitutions and the 1787 Ordinance. The Ohio River acted as a porous border between free and slave territory, with free blacks frequently kidnapped into

Kentucky, despite state laws aimed at preventing “manstealing.” The result, according to George

Flower, was that “for all practical purposes, this part of the Territory was as much a slave-state as any of the states south of the Ohio River.”23

As it turned out, the Flowers and other immigrant settlers on the “English prairie” would play a decisive role in preventing pro-slavery forces in Illinois from overturning the state’s constitutional ban on slavery. English migrants were already disposed to look unfavorably upon the institution, according to a memoir jointly written by Flower and Birkbeck: “We had chosen, as we thought, one of the freest governments in the world, and one of the freest states in the

Union, because it was new and free,” they recalled. “To be there betrayed into the jaws of

Slavery, excited our indignation and determined opposition.” Furthermore, Birkbeck and Flower claimed that the English legal tradition to which they clung “acknowledge[d] no property in man.” Both the younger and elder Flowers and Morris Birkbeck were heavily involved in the antislavery propaganda campaign that followed in the local press. After a bitter struggle, the antislavery candidate, , was elected governor. Coles, a Virginia-born confidant of

Madison and Jefferson, had settled seventeen of his own manumitted slaves in Edwardsville,

23 Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (University Park, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 138–140; John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 96–123; Birkbeck and Flower, History of the English Settlement, 199. Robert J. Steinfeld has argued that in Indiana, in contrast, the case of “Mary Clark, a Woman of Color” established an important precedent for both antislavery and free labor. Clark, a black household servant ruled to be free under the laws of the state, could not be held to either “involuntary servitude” nor “specific performance of contract” after she decided to abscond from her master. See Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 144–49. 64

Illinois, before moving to the state himself in 1819. Meanwhile, however, a proslavery coalition, led by politicians from former slave states, under the leadership of Willis Hargrave, the territorial inspector of the salt-works, mobilized a system of secret caucuses and committees to work for the overthrow of the ban on human property.24

After proslavery forces openly announced their intentions to introduce slavery at a convention held in Vandalia, and later boldly attempted to unseat an antislavery representative in the state legislature, the stage was set for another showdown over slavery. As Flower later recalled, “the indignation that had slumbered too long” among the English settlers was aroused, and once again, English immigrants were at the forefront of antislavery efforts to defeat the insurgents. “An Address to the Citizens of Illinois for the Day of Election,” published in the

Illinois Gazette, combined a humanistic denunciation of slavery as “a system of oppression... exceeding in its cruelty and injustice all other calamities inflicted by tyranny” with free-labor arguments citing slavery’s deleterious effects on population and land values, the availability of capital for manufacturing, and the development of public institutions, like schools. A more plainspoken English farmer, writing as “Jonathan Freeman,” put the issue in simpler terms; “as to neighbors,” he explained, the English migrants wanted “plain farmers, working with their own free hands, or the hands of free workmen.” If slave-owning planters, like those in neighboring

Kentucky, were allowed to have their way, they would “rule over us like little kings; we should have to patrol round the country to keep their negroes under.” Another editorialist, “Aristedes,” argued that “the labor of the free man is always more productive than the labor of the slave” since “the white laborer has an interest in his toil and in his reward.” Observing that “a sweeping

24 William H. Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison, WI: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 23–24; see also E. B. Washburn, Sketch of Edward Coles, Second Governor of Illinois and of the Slavery Struggle of 1823–4, in Clarence Walworth Alvord, ed., Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, Vol. XV (Springfield, IL: Illinois State Historical Library, 1920); Suzanne Cooper Guasco, Confronting Slavery: Edward Coles and the Rise of Antislavery Politics in Nineteenth-Century America (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013).

65 majority of us are poor,” “Aristedes” warned his readers that “negro capitalists” (i.e., slaveowners) and “wealthy nabob[s]” would “monopolize large tracts” of the best land. Whether thanks to the appeal of self-interested arguments like those of “Freeman” and “Aristedes,” or of the humanitarian sentiments expressed by English settlers like the Flowers, the proslavery efforts in Illinois were defeated. A referendum called for August, 1824, aimed at forming a convention to overthrow the state’s antislavery laws, was defeated by a narrow margin, ending for all intents and purposes any serious consideration of introducing slavery into Illinois. “It may be too much to say that our Settlement decided the fate of the State in favor of freedom,” Flower later concluded. “But when we consider the small majority by which this Free-state held to its integrity, it may perhaps be inferred that, if our influence, as well as our votes, had been cast the other way, Illinois would probably have been at this day a slave-state.”25

Flower’s quote not only suggests the key role played by small blocs of committed voters in determining the outcome of decisions over slavery in the free states in the period, but points to the consequences of such decisions for all that transpired afterwards. As time went on, ordinary northerners would become increasingly convinced that the security of “free labor,” however they defined it, was dependent on the availability of “free soil.” This applied just as readily to radical and utopian experiments in free labor like Owen’s New Harmony. Out of some ninety organized communities formed by various Owenite, Fourierist, perfectionist and religious groups in the

United States between 1825 and 1860, only eight of them were located in slave states.26 As

25 Morris Birkbeck and George Flower, History of the English Settlement, 24–25, 170, 199, 208–09, 257–59; David Ress, Governor Edward Coles and the Vote to Forbid Slavery in Illinois, 1823–1824 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006); Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “ ‘The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists’: Southern Yeomen and the Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois,” Civil War History 47, No. 1 (March, 2007), 8; Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 45–47. 26 Based on Arthur Bestor’s “Checklist of Communitarian Experiments,” in Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, “Appendix,” 277–84. Bestor’s count includes ten communities he describes as “Owenite,” (to which I would add Wright’s Nashoba), as well as the Fourierist communities of the 1840s and 50s and various religious communities such as those of the Shakers and perfectionists.

66 reflected by the experience of Frances Wright’s Nashoba community, described below, southern states were hardly welcoming to experiments that threatened to meddle with their social institutions, particularly the institution of slavery. Frances Wright’s Nashoba community would push the limits of antebellum Americans’ tolerance on several fronts, including those related to property, labor, gender, and sexuality. But it was Nashoba’s avowed purpose of tampering with the institution of slavery that probably doomed it from the start.

Frances Wright and the Failure of Free Labor at Nashoba

In 1826, inspired by what she saw at New Harmony, Frances Wright would launch what was may have the most ambitious experiment in free labor to date at Nashoba, Tennessee.

Wright, perhaps more than any other figure of the period, embodied the intersection of radical reform with Enlightenment humanism and Jeffersonian democracy. Born in Scotland in 1795, she inculcated the humanitarian values and rational of the Enlightenment firsthand, traveling in elite intellectual circles and cultivating personal relationships with the Marquis de

Lafayette, Jeremy Bentham, and . Like Owen, too, she early concerned herself with the social problems created by the rise of industrial capitalism and factory labor in Britain, and was drawn to republican America, where she traveled extensively beginning in 1818. But unlike Owen, Wright was strongly attracted to democratic ideals and quickly became a fierce partisan of Jeffersonian democracy. A fiery early advocate of women’s rights, she railed against all forms of monopoly, special privilege, and “religious prejudice.”

Like many European visitors with democratic predilections, Wright was extremely taken with her adopted homeland. Despite her militant secularism, Wright often described the United

States, and in particular the Jeffersonian vision which she felt represented the best hope for its future, in rapturous, quasi-religious tones. In Wright’s eyes, America was tarnished only by the

67 sin of slavery. In her early travels in the United States, Wright described her encounters with slavery in deeply personal tones: “My soul sickens,” she wrote, upon observing a ship full of manacled slaves bound for New Orleans. “When my thoughts turn to America the crying sin of her slavery weighs upon my heart,” she wrote to a friend in 1824, “there are moments when this foul blot so defaces to my mind’s eye all the beauty of her character that I turn with disgust from her.” Comparing the United States favorably to England, where “class is opposed to class, the higher detest & despise the lower,” she was forced to admit that, in the American South, “liberty

[is] mocked & outraged/& that by a race of free men, who... grasp the chain of oppression in their hands, denying to the wretched sons of Africa that hold birthright wch they themselves declare man holds of God.” For Wright, however, solace was to be found when “I recollect that some of the free were once slave states;” the South, she believed, could only “defer the day of emancipation. It is not in their authority to hold the African much longer in darkness, already he feels the chain, & he who feels will soon snap it.”27

Even before Wright’s arrival in Indiana, her eventual partner in the Nashoba plan, George

Flower, had considered the possibility of applying the communitarian and cooperative systems of

Rapp and Owen to the abolition of slavery. As early as 1819, Flower had been contemplating the establishment of “a society for freeing blacks, and employing free blacks... on the Harmony plan.”28 Wright is thought to have discussed her plans with George Flower during a stopover at

Albion in March 1825. That June, Flower joined Wright in New York, where they developed the

Nashoba plan together and presented it at special meetings that gathered together noted

27 Frances Wright to Harriet Garnett, (n.d., probably October 1820); Wright to Julia Garnett, 1 May 1824, in Payne- Gaposchkin, ed., “The Nashoba Plan.” 28 Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 219–221. Flower’s 1819 plans are described in William Faux, Memorable Days in America (London, 1823), 49.

68 philanthropists, including New York Governor De Witt Clinton and the aging General Lafayette, both of whom wrote that they found Wright’s ideas intriguing.

Neither Wright’s nor Flower’s approach to antislavery had been formed in a vacuum; rather, they emerged in the context of the aftermath of a long and bitter struggle over the future of slavery in the northwestern territories. To some extent, they were also framed by a political and cultural environment in which colonization—the resettling of emancipated slaves outside of, or in a designated area within, the territorial boundaries of the United States—still loomed as a viable alternative in the minds of many antislavery activists. Formed in 1816, the ACS was largest colonization organization, and claimed prominent politicians and slaveholders like Henry

Clay and , as well as free-state men and dedicated abolitionists, among its ranks.

Schemes for the resettlement of blacks in the period ranged from the literal “dumping” of emancipated slaves in free states to the American Colonization Society’s costly and ongoing efforts to establish a “colony” for former slaves in Liberia.29

As time went on, mixed reports about the Liberia settlement, the conspicuous presence of slaveholders on the ACS’s board of directors, and the organization’s negligible impact on reducing the numbers of enslaved people convinced most abolitionists that the ACS upheld slavery in practice, if not in theory. Wright’s views on colonization closely mirrored those of abolitionists like Benjamin Lundy and his protégé, . Lundy himself personally assisted in the colonization of over 200 formerly enslaved people through the agency of the Haitian Office of Immigration in Baltimore, and he enthusiastically published Wright’s

29 On colonization, see Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, Fl.: University of Florida Press, 2005); Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Nicholas S. Guyatt, “'The Outskirts of Our Happiness': Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History, Vol. 95 No. 5 (March 2009), 986-1011; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014), 83-192.

69 plan for Nashoba in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, updated readers about its progress, and encouraged interested parties to apply in person at his office in Baltimore.30 Northern free blacks, despite their distrust of the ACS and strong evidence of a general consensus in favor of remaining in the land of their birth, also occasionally voiced support for colonization. John

Russwurm, one of the two founders of Freedom’s Journal, the first African-American newspaper, reversed the paper’s earlier stance against colonization and emigrated to Liberia himself in 1830, later becoming a prominent official there. Other free blacks fled to Canada, where beginning in the 1830s they formed organized permanent settlements that bore some similarities to the utopian community-building that was a hallmark of the period.31 African-

American support for colonization (or “emigration”), however, was always controversial, and usually contingent on free blacks’ assessment of the waxing and waning prospects for their future status as citizens, a future constantly troubled during the antebellum period by evolving political developments and subject to the caprices of white constituencies.32

30 Garrison clung to support for colonization until his mind was changed, in part by the a large anti-colonization gathering held by a group of African Americans in New York City in January 1831, whose “Address” he incorporated into his Thoughts on African Colonization. William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston, 1832). See also “An Address to the Citizens of New-York,” the Liberator, 12 February 1831. Lundy claimed to have traveled some 25,000 miles, including 5,000 of them on foot, in the course of these efforts. See Lundy, ed., The Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia: William D. Parrish, 1847, 2 Vols.). As early as 1819, Lundy had sent James C. Brown, a formerly enslaved African American, as an emissary to Texas “to find shelter and suitable situations for free people of color.” See Benjamin Drew, A North Side View of Slavery, 241. See also, “Treaty, at the city of Victoria, Capital of the free and Sovereign State of Tamaulipas,” (Original in Spanish and English translation, 1835); “Lundy to Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,” December 30, 1833; “Articles of Agreement between Lundy and Lyman A Spalding... ,” (1836); “Government of the State of Tamaulipas – Circular,” 17 Nov 1833; Lundy, “Travel diaries,” all in Benjamin Lundy Papers, Ohio History Connection. 31 William H. Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experience in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963). The association between utopian communities and the intentional communities formed by African Americans in the period has been challenged by more recent scholarship, however; see Marie Carter, “William Whipper’s Lands along the Sydenham” and “Reimagining the Dawn Settlement,” in Boulou Ebanda de B’béri, Nina Reid-Maroney, and Handel Kashope Wright, eds., The Promised Land: History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements and Beyond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 73–91, 176–193. 32 See “An Address to the Citizens of New-York,” described in footnote 25 above, for the widely-publicized negative reaction of a group of New York City blacks to the activities of the ACS and other colonization schemes. About Lundy’s Haitian scheme, Freedom’s Journal wrote that “it may safely be asserted, that the terms thus offered to the slaves who may be permitted to embrace them, are better than, perhaps, have ever been held out to the acceptance of any considerable number of persons in similar circumstances... They will be emphatically free, the moment they touch the soil of Hayti—under the protection of a republican government, composed of their brethren.” Freedom’s Journal, 21 December 1827.

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For her part, Frances Wright assumed that the egalitarian doctrine of Jefferson’s

Declaration applied equally to African Americans, and she frequently pointed out the hypocrisy of a nation that had “declared all men ‘born free and equal,’” yet continued to allow for “the lamentable exception... of its citizens of color.” In her published writings on Nashoba, she pushed her readers and hearers to expand reigning definitions of freedom and accept the logical conclusions of the Declaration. “Liberty without equality, what is it but a chimera?” she demanded. “Is there not... an equality more precious than what is termed political? Before we are citizens, are we not human beings, must we not possess equal advantages, equal means of improvement and of enjoyment?” Unlike New Harmony’s Preliminary Society, Wright’s

Nashoba allowed for the full “admission and incorporation” of “free citizens of color,” as shareholder-trustees and residents, on “the same principles of equality which guide the admission of all members.” Significantly, it also provided for the education of the children of enslaved people in integrated schools.33

Nonetheless, the experiment at Nashoba was conceived and conducted within the framework created by a set of assumptions about slavery and race, the boundaries of which suggest the limits of antislavery and democratic egalitarianism in the 1820s. Foremost among these was the prevailing belief, widespread if not universal among white Americans of the period, that an interracial society consisting of free blacks and whites living on a basis of equality was politically and socially impossible. Wright claimed not to share what she called the

“absurd” and “foolish” “attachment to a pure white skin” that she encountered among white

33 Frances Wright, Deed of the Lands of Nashoba, West Tennessee (Nashoba, 1 February 1827; signed 17 December 1826). No “free citizens of color” took Wright up on the offer to become members of Nashoba, but John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish offered a qualified defense of Wright and her experiment in Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first African- American newspaper. See Freedom’s Journal, Vol. 2, No. 11 (6 June 1828). Thomas Jefferson also offered qualified support for the experiment at Nashoba, suggesting in a letter to Wright that “every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried” to end slavery. See Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. X, (New York and London: G.P. Putnam and Son, 1905), 343–45.

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Americans. preference for white skin and the fears of racial “amalgamation” that lurked not far beneath the arguments of colonizationists and other apologists for slavery. The “aristocracy of color” was, Wright seemed to believe, the “peculiar vice” of the United States. But irrational or not, Wright believed that white racism constituted an insurmountable obstacle to any practical scheme for emancipation. The “prejudice... against a mixture of the two colors is so deeply rooted in the American mind,” she explained to an English friend, “that emancipation without expatriation” was “impossible.” Furthermore, “personal observation” had demonstrated “the danger of launching a freed slave into the midst of an inimical population.” Some form of colonization outside of the United States, then, appeared to be the logical answer. 34

In theory, her support for colonization placed Wright among the wide range of politicians and other prominent figures who claimed membership in the American Colonization Society.

But in private, Wright insisted that the emancipation societies like the Pennsylvania Abolition

Society and New York Manumission Society, not the colonizationists, were “the real friends of the liberty of man.” However noble the colonizationists’ intentions might be, she wrote, “I cannot but consider the essence of the institution to be favorable to slavery.” Under the approach adopted by the ACS, emancipation came “at the expense of helping forward the general evil”; moreover, it was impractical, since “to remove the whole colored population of the country wd be impossible & this all rational & reflecting men admit.” Free, waged labor was a far more logical outcome for emancipated blacks than colonization, Wright admitted, but “the objection made here [by slaveholders] was always one & the same”; emancipated blacks would “in time assert equality with the whites & an amalgamation of the two colors be induced.” Nonetheless,

34 Wright to Julia Garnett, 12 Nov 1824; 8 June 1825; Frances Wright D’Arusmont [?], Fanny Wright Unmasked By Her Own Pen. Explanatory Notes, Respecting the nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the Principles Upon Which It Is Founded, Addressed to the Friends of Human Improvement, In All Countries and Of All Nations (New York, 1850), 6; Wright, Deed of the Lands of Nashoba; Wright to J.C.L. de Sismondi, quoted in Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 153.

72 some form of colonization appeared to be the best way to “conciliate the laws of the southern states, and the popular feelings of the whole Union as well as the interests of the emancipated negro.”35

But it was not merely concern for the fate of freed blacks, nor concessions to white racist fears about “amalgamation” that shaped Wright’s plan. From the beginning, Nashoba was conceived as an effort “to render [the] advantages [of cooperative free labor] more immediately apparent.” Like free labor ideologues from Adam Smith onward, Wright took the superiority of free labor over slave labor as an article of faith, one that she seemed to assume even slaveholders recognized as “an admitted truth.” The exhausted soil and backwards economies of Maryland and Virginia proved that slavery was “profitless”; only in the growth of stables like cotton and sugar, where slave plantations were artificially “secured from competition,” could slavery be profitable. Comparing the success of British free-labor plantations in India and South America,

Wright predicted that these would eventually pose a threat to the southern dominance in the production of cotton and other “tropical productions.” In the meantime, if a practical demonstration could prove that free black laborers could be use to grow staple crops at a profit in one state, “the example must gradually extend through all.” Nashoba’s “experiment farm” and

“school of industry” would offer both an asylum for oppressed slaves and an example for their masters, whom Wright believed were “anxious to manumit their people, but apprehensive of throwing them unprepared into the world.”36

35 Wright, Deed of the Lands of Nashoba; Wright to Julia Garnett, 8 June 1825; Fanny Wright Unmasked, 8; “Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” New-Harmony Gazette, 1 October, 1825; reprinted in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, 15 October 1825; Lundy also published Wright’s plan as a pamphlet. On Lundy and colonization, see Lundy, ed., The Genius of Universal Emancipation, Vol II., Third Edition, (May 1831–1832), 17–18, 242–46. The deed in which Wright turned over Nashoba’s lands and other property to be held in trust by a number of trustees, is dated December 17, 1825; both it and the “Communication from the Trustees,” dated February 1, 1827, were published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation. See also a competing “Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” based on colonization and published in the Genius, 5 September 1825. 36 “Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” New-Harmony Gazette, 1 October, 1825.

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Wright may have done the most to flesh out the egalitarian and free-labor premises that guided Nashoba, but it was George Flower who recognized the importance of slavery’s many links to the developing capitalist economy in driving the expansion of both northern free labor and southern slavery. It was the sheer amount of capital tied up in enslaved property, Flower observed, that posed the most significant obstacle to emancipation. Accordingly, the Nashoba plan incentivized emancipation for both slaveholders, by providing them with remuneration in return for divesting themselves of the burden of unwanted slaves, and capitalists, by providing them the opportunity to invest as shareholders in an undertaking securitized by property in land and slaves. Much like the communitarian “corporations” formed by “mechanics with small available capitals” recommended by the Mechanics’ Free Press, or the joint-stock companies founded by Fourierists in later decades, the plan for Nashoba depended on the accumulation and redirection of capital away from individualistic competition and towards benevolent, cooperative ends. Wright and Flower projected a 6 percent return for investors—a prediction that turned out to be as far-fetched as the plan’s algorithmic calculation of the tens of thousands of slaves it would emancipate over a period of decades. But Flower’s key insight—that capital “in the hands of benevolence would become the instrument of removing slavery from the U.S. in the shortest possible time”—was of a piece with the expectations engendered by the brand of paternalistic capitalism endorsed by Robert Owen. Nor did it seem hopelessly fantastic in an era defined by apparently limitless economic expansion and a “federal consensus” that recognized distinct barriers to the national government’s ability to interfere in either the local institution of slavery or the sphere of economic activity.37

37 Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 104–05; George Flower to Edward Flower, 22 January 1826, George Flower Papers.

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Wright and Flower’s “Plan,” announced in the same issue of the New-Harmony Gazette that published the racially-exclusionary constitution of the Preliminary Society, thus reflected many of the reigning ideas then prevalent in contemporary antislavery and free labor thought. It assumed that emancipation must be gradual, voluntary, and compensated; and that some form of colonization or separation would comprise the ultimate solution for the irreconcilable hostility between the races. It combined these assumptions with an unprecedented (and, to its enemies, highly threatening) experiment in racially-integrated education, an unshakeable conviction in the superiority of free labor, and a much more vague commitment to the principles of cooperation and of property. Two sections of unclaimed “congress lands” would be purchased in an unspecified location (Wright suggested Tennessee), and between fifty and one hundred enslaved people purchased from willing slaveowners and settled on the land. Self- interest would then compel the latter to work to “redeem” their freedom, paying off the initial cost of purchase as well as any costs incurred by sickness or accident; the average length of time necessary to redeem one’s purchase was thought to be five years. Enslaved people would be inculcated in the value of free labor, utilizing a “mild but steady system of order and economy”; weekly meetings would instruct them in the “values of industry,” and shiftless or recalcitrant slaves would have time added to their terms of service. Profits raised by growing cotton or other crops would defray expenses and eventually allow the community to operate at a profit.38

Accordingly, in February, 1826, Wright purchased Lukey, an enslaved woman, and her six children from Robert Wilson, a South Carolina slaveowner; earlier she had secured the purchase of another five enslaved men, three women, and three children. The enslaved people arrived at the Nashoba site in March of that year. Five acres were cleared and fenced, log cabins

38 “Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” New-Harmony Gazette, 1 October 1825.

75 built, and an apple orchard, corn and cotton crops were planted. Persuasion and paternalism, rather than the lash, were used; and “advice” given “to refrain from any bad habits they may have contracted” under slavery, in order to inspire the still-enslaved workers with “habitual industry voluntarily arising amongst the people themselves.”

In one way at least, Nashoba lived up to its founder’s promise of racial egalitarianism. In a striking departure from even the most liberal opinion about education for African Americans, such as that which guided the establishment of so-called “African schools” in Boston and New

York, the Nashoba plan dictated that all children in the community be educated in integrated schools. Wright apparently took injunction quite seriously; the official “Deed” in which she transferred the rights to Nashoba’s land and property to a set of trustees in late 1826 contained a clause which mandated that “no difference will be made... between the white children, and the children of color, whether in education or any other advantage.” As Wright wrote to another friend, the purpose of Nashoba was “to prepare the two colors for the coming change. It is to kill prejudices in the white man by raising the black man to his level... not the mere theory, but the practice of equality.” Judging by her long-standing conviction that education was the key to alleviating inequalities in a democratic society and her association with prominent European education reformers like William Maclure, Marie Fretageot, and Wright’s future husband

William Phiquepal D’Arusmont, it may be inferred that she took the quality of education at

Nashoba quite seriously as well. Wright closely studied the “Education Society” at New

Harmony run by Maclure and Fretageot. Based on the ideas of Swiss educator J. H. Pestalozzi, who proposed educating the children of the poor with concrete examples and practical

76 instruction, rather than the emphasis on classical languages that then dominated European education, the New Harmony school provided instruction for some 400 students.39

Like so much else about Nashoba, however, the record of its success or failure in education is ambiguous. Alternately referred to as a “manual labor,” “industrial,” or

“Lancasterian” school (after the British education reformer who started a model school for poor children in Philadelphia), the school apparently provided the seven children of the enslaved residents as well as the children of George and Eliza Flower with a mix of manual labor training and instruction in the sciences, mathematics, and humanities. William Maclure, a man of science and experienced educator, was sufficiently impressed with what he saw during his visit in late

1826 that he proclaimed the belief in black inferiority to be unfounded and predicted great success for the colony. Other visitors, like Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, contrasted Nashoba favorably to the rapidly-deteriorating situation at New Harmony.40

If, as Wright subsequently declared, free labor education had been “the soul of the plan contemplated,” the experiment at Nashoba was in theory “founded on the principle of community of property and labor.” But Nashoba, like New Harmony before it, offered little evidence of any serious effort to achieve a community of property. For Wright, “the cooperative system” was merely “the means” of “securing the one great end” of human liberty and equality.

Thus the experiment was to be “conducted within the limits of private, or as in the present case of associate property,” i.e., that contributed by the capital and labor of its white benefactors and

39 On the role of education at New Harmony and Nashoba, see Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 126–29; Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 133–59, 182–85, 191–93, 197–201, and passim. Wright also cited the influence of Joseph Lancaster, the British education reformer who started a model school in Philadelphia and a society for promoting the education of the poor. See “Plan,” New-Harmony Gazette, 1 Oct 1825. The emphasis on education for the poor and working classes would prove to be the most consequential and lasting influence of both Owenism and Wright in the United States, as discussed in the following chapter. 40 Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 133.

77 resident trustees.41 Nor could the presumptive beneficiaries of the Nashoba plan, the slaves, lay no claim to ownership of any part of its land, buildings, or profits—nor even to their own bodies.

Although, according to George Flower, who moved to Nashoba with his family in the winter of

1825–26, the labor of the enslaved people was directed “in the usual way that free laborers would be,” there was one obvious difference that separated them from free white workers.

Despite its declared devotion to humanitarian principles and equal rights, the antislavery experiment at Nashoba left the institution of property in man intact. The enslaved workers at

Nashoba continued to be referred to as “slaves,” and, until the experiment came to an end sometime in 1830, the freedom they experienced was a nominal one indeed.42

Regardless of whatever good intentions may have lain behind it, however, the community at Nashoba soon collapsed under the strain produced by the collision of its grandiose expectations with the realities of frontier survival in a hostile environment. Despite a call aimed at young men with “some useful trade,” who had completed an apprenticeship with “a good artisan or mechanic,—blacksmith, carpenter, sawyer, brickmaker, bricklayer, shoemaker, tanner, weaver, &c.,” the projected steam-powered sawmill, cotton gin, blacksmiths’ and carpenter’s shops never materialized. During the winter of 1826–27, Wright had become seriously ill, and she departed for Europe that May. Flower and his family abandoned the experiment for reasons that remain unclear, and the colony was left in charge of Wright’s sister Camilla and a resident trustee, James Richardson. In Wright’s absence, both order and good intentions broke down. On at least one occasion, Richardson resorted to the physical punishment, by flogging, of two slaves

41 “Preface,” Frances Wright D’Arusmont, Course of Popular Lectures, Vol II (Philadelphia, 1837), xiv; Wright, Deed of the Lands of Nashoba; Fanny Wright Unmasked, 8, 13. George Flower wrote to Frederick Rapp in Pittsburgh, inquiring about the purchase of a steam engine that was to have powered a grist or saw mill as well as a cotton gin. George Flower to Frederick Rapp, 24 October 1825; quoted in Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 110. 42 Flower quoted in Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 121; “Frances Wright’s Establishment,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, 28 June 1827. See also Gail Bederman, “Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818–1826,” American Literary History 17:3 (Autumn, 2005), 438–59.

78 and—far more egregiously in the eyes of respectable opinion—he began an apparent sexual relationship with Josephine, the mixed-race daughter of Charlotte Larieu (sometimes called

Lolotte), a free black woman who had come from New Orleans to assist in running the Nashoba school. It was the latter development that proved to be Nashoba’s, and Wright’s, undoing. News of the community’s progress had initially received favorable notice in abolitionist papers, including Lundy’s Genius and the country’s first African-American newspaper, Freedom’s

Journal.43 But after an incredulous Lundy published Richardson’s frank revelations about the relationship in the Genius of Universal Emancipation that June, the tide of public opinion— always wary of the interracial experiment at best, and now exacerbated by Wright’s bold declarations against the institution of marriage in favor of limited sexual freedom—turned decisively against her. Isolated in the wilderness and alienated from any visible means of support from backers who now rapidly distanced themselves from the project, the community foundered.44 In February, 1828, Wright and Robert Dale Owen issued a dire “Communication from the Trustees of Nashoba” in which they declared that they were abandoning the communitarian and cooperative principles that had supposedly guided the settlement from its inception. Over the next year, the colony fell apart, and in January of 1830, Wright accompanied the remaining slaves to Haiti, where they were permanently resettled with the assistance of the

Haitian government.45

By then, Owen’s experiment at New Harmony was already a thing of the past. Despite its success in attracting skilled craftsmen from eastern cities, the community’s open-ended

43 Genius of Universal Emancipation, October 15, 1825; Freedom’s Journal, May 11, 1827; June 6, 1828. 44 Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, 121; 133–34; 138–39; 208–13. The Nashoba trustees named were the Marquis de Lafayette, Willaim Maclure, Robert Owen, Robert Dale Owen, Cadwallader Colden, Richesson Whitby, Robert Jennings, George Flower, Camilla Wright, and James Richardson. Of the group named, only Camilla Wright, Flower, Dale Owen, Whitby, Jennings, and Richardson actually lived at the settlement. 45 “Communication from the Trustees of Nashoba,” New-Harmony Gazette, III, 124 (30 January, 1828); Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 225–26.

79 membership requirements meant that these could not be chosen in anything like the proportions necessary to sustain the planned manufacturing output. The population of approximately 800 employed seventeen boot- and shoe-makers, and sustained a hat manufactory and ropewalk, while gainfully employing carpenters, bricklayers, stonecutters, tailors, butchers, and blacksmiths. But the planned wool- and cotton-spinning factories and dyeworks operated far below capacity due to a lack of skilled hands, while skilled workers whose trades could not be put to use—whose numbers included three tobacconists and two papermakers—were listed as

“unemployed.” An even bigger problem was the lack of members with agricultural skills; the community’s unofficial occupational census listed only thirty-six farmers and field laborers, thereby dooming the colony’s ability to raise adequate food provisions.46 Community of property had proven elusive; Owen retained ownership of the community’s land and buildings (although depleting his considerable fortune in the process) while holding out promises that would be “held in trust” during this “intermediate” phase. The community’s official organ, the

New Harmony Gazette, admitted failure by March, 1827, and Owen departed for Scotland that

June. 47

As Owen had gradually developed and unveiled more and more radical ideas about religion, sexuality and marital relations, and the common ownership of property, his cache with elite audiences in both the United States and Britain had slowly begun to wither away. In this sense the “Declaration of Mental Independence,” and the failure of New Harmony and Nashoba represented another turning point, although not one Owen himself seems to have recognized.

Never again would Owen command the kind of respect and attention from elites that he had

46 Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 162–63. See also T.M. Bosson, “View of New Harmony,” New Harmony Gazette, I, (22 October, 1825). 47 Claeys, “Introduction,”; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 162; Donald F. Carmody and Josephine M. Elliott, “New Harmony, Indiana: Seedbed for Utopia,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. LXXVI (September, 1980), 164–65.

80 enjoyed between 1815 and 1825. But in Britain, he would re-emerge as a leader of the trades unionist movement and Parliamentary candidate, inspiring a second wave of cooperative and trades union activity there in the 1830s and 40s.48 Nor did the failure of New Harmony represent the end of communitarian experimentation in the United States. Among those who remained on the New Harmony lands after its failure were farmers from the nearby English settlement in

Illinois. In early 1826, New Harmony’s “Preliminary Society” had fragmented into several separate communities, including an “Education Society,” a “Society of Manufacturers and

Mechanics,” and an agricultural group composed almost entirely of local English migrants.

Called at first simply “Community No. III,” the English farmers renamed the settlement “Feiba-

Peveli” (the result of transcribing the colony’s location in latitude and longitude into letters), and enjoyed a significant degree of success, building substantial houses and eventually remaining on the land as individual proprietors. One resident of the English Settlement, William Hall, went on to form, with five other Englishmen, the Wanborough Cooperative Association, a joint-stock society organized “upon the principle of a union of Labour and Capital.”49

Owenite ideas would continue to have a profound influence on the direction of labor reform in the following decades. As suggested by the organization of the Wanborough

Association, worker in various forms, including mutual-aid societies, “protective unions,” and “labor for labor” exchanges would become a favored means of reform over the next decades, with dozens proliferating in both the United States and Britain. Owen himself, along with his son Robert Dale Owen and their collaborator Frances Wright, would remain popular

48 Owen became the titular leader of two major early labor organizations in Britain in the 1830s, the National Equitable Labour Exchange and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of Great Britain and Ireland. 49 While the ultimate fate of the Wanborough Society is unknown, it represents but one example of the many Owen- inspired efforts undertaken over the next few decades to establish worker’s cooperatives and other cooperative ventures on both sides of the Atlantic. See, for example, the collection of broadsides and pamphlets proposing and chartering cooperative societies in Kenneth E. Carpenter, ed., British Labour Struggles: Contemporary Pamphlets 1727–1850: Owenism and the Working Class (New York: Arno Press, 1972); Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 779–806.

81 with working-class audiences, although neither Owen would achieve the kind of status in the

United States that the elder Owen held for the workingmen’s movement in England, where

Owen headed the Equitable Labour Exchange, the Owenite trade union that claimed one million members by 1834. Perhaps more importantly, Owen’s theories of the impact of environment on the formation of human character and his insistence that human beings could be “elevated” through education profoundly influenced a host of subsequent reforms, from poor relief to demands for common schools to antislavery.50

Neither did the enthusiasm for organizing planned communities among workingmen completely die away. The leading labor newspaper in Philadelphia, the Mechanics’ Free Press, carried a regular column throughout much of 1830 addressed to “Industrious Mechanics who possess small available capitals,” urging them to form a colony based “upon a semi-co-operative principle”; contributors speculated on and debated about the proper form such a community might take.51 In the 1840s, a new frenzy of community-building, inspired by such diverse sources as the religious perfectionism of John Humphrey Noyes, the transcendentalist idealism of Brook

Farm, the anarchistic version of “free labor” endorsed by , and the theories of

Charles Fourier (described in Chapter Five), would all attempt to avoid the mistakes and build on the precedents established by New Harmony.

In 1828–29, Owen traveled to Texas, then still part of Mexico, and attempted to negotiate with the Mexican government for a land grant for the establishment of new Owenite communities. He would be followed there by Benjamin Lundy, who journeyed throughout Texas

50 See, for example, the broadsides and pamphlets proposing and chartering cooperative societies in Carpenter, ed., Contemporary Pamphlets 1727–1850; John R. Commons and Helen L. Sumner, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. V, Labor Movement, 1820–1840, Volume 1, (Cleveland, Oh.: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), 124–37. The “protective union” movement in the United States is covered in Chapters Seven and Eight, below.

51 “To Industrious Mechanics who possess small Available Capitals,” Mechanics’ Free Press, 22 May 1830; 29 May 1830; 5 June 1830; 12 June 1830.

82 and Tamaulipas between the late 1820s and mid-1830s and purchased land in the latter, hoping to create a settlement of emancipated slaves, the purpose of which was “to test the advantages of free-labor on the American continent.”52 Both visions, however, would be quashed by the next decade’s efforts, led by slaveholders, to annex Texas to the United States, efforts that culminated in the Mexican-American War of 1846–48—a key turning point in the evolution of free-soil antislavery, and one which embodied the dashed hopes of many eastern workingmen who clung to the dream of independent proprietorship in the western territories. Frances Wright and Robert

Dale Owen would move to New York City, where they would become embroiled in contentious debate over the vision for the city’s newly-formed Working Men’s Party. Although Dale Owen would go on to be remembered as an important antislavery congressman, Wright’s attempts to return to the subject of slavery would be met with a firestorm of criticism, censorship, and mob violence—as much from “gentlemen of property and standing” as from the workingmen whose attention she courted. In the toxic atmosphere that poisoned almost all discussion of antislavery in the 1830s, even small sparks could set off a conflagration—and the legacy of the Owenite experimentation of the previous decade had branded Wright’s abolitionism as inflammable material.

52 Quoted in William H. Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 171, n61. On Lundy’s ventures in Texas and Mexico, see Lundy, Life, Travels, and Opinions; and Lundy, A Circular, Addressed to Agriculturalists, Manufacturers, Mechanics, &c., on the Subject of Mexican Colonization (Philadelphia: J. Richards, 1835), as well scattered references in Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation and his travel diaries, collection of the Ohio History Connection.

83

84

CHAPTER THREE “As Tho This Great City Were Once Again on Fire”: The Working Men’s Parties, the Locofocos, and the “Urban Agrarian” Origins of Antislavery Politics

Some time around New Years’ Day 1829, Frances Wright and her travelling companion,

Robert Jennings, arrived in New York City. Having abandoned her antislavery experiment at

Nashoba, Wright had decided to bring her ideas directly to the American people, embarking on a months-long speaking tour that took her and Jennings up the Mississippi from Memphis to St.

Louis, to Louisville, Kentucky, up the Ohio to Cincinnati, then across the Alleghenies to

Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. As always, controversy followed her. Wright was greeted by large and enthusiastic audiences in Louisville, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia, but her unorthodox views on marriage and religion, as well as her antislavery, made her a magnet for controversy. The former New York mayor and noted diarist Philip Hone dubbed Wright a

“female Tom Paine”; others, less kindly, referred to her as a “voluptuous preacher of licentiousness,” and the “Red Harlot of Infidelity.” Nonetheless, Wright decided to make her home in New York, a city she described as “the head seat... of popular energy... wealth and power, and financial and political corruption.”1 After Robert Dale Owen arrived in the city that

April, the two resumed printing their recently-launched newspaper, the Free Enquirer (formerly the New-Harmony and Nashoba Gazette), and Wright purchased the former Ebenezer Baptist

Church on Broome Street, which she and Owen turned into a “Hall of Science,” dedicated to promoting “the sectarian faith” and disseminating “universal knowledge.” Wright would prove popular with workingmen, who flocked to the Hall to hear her speak. Later that year, Wright and

1 Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851 (New York: Dodd Mead, 1927), 9–10; Frances Wright, “Biography of Frances Wright D’Arusmont,” in Annette K. Baxter and Leon Stein, eds., American Women: Images and Realities (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 43.

85

Owen would garner significant support as they vied for control of the newly organized Working

Men’s Party.2

In New York, Wright continued to be a lightning rod. At one of her first public lectures in the city, someone placed a barrel of turpentine in front of the entrance to the hall and set it on fire, sending smoke billowing into the hall above and creating a near-stampede. At another appearance, someone turned off the gas, extinguishing the gaslights and casting the hall into darkness. Supporters in the crowd lit candles instead; Wright finished her lecture and was carried out into the street in triumph. It was a fitting opening to the New York career of Fanny Wright, who would soon become identified with the radical Democratic politics of the Locofocos, the anti-Tammany faction that famously took their name from the brand of matches they used as a source of impromptu illumination during a similar, if better-known episode at Tammany Hall several years later.3

But such riotous scenes arguably paled in comparison to those that greeted Wright when, on another lecture tour circuit during the spring and summer of 1836, Wright attempted to revisit the issue of slavery. Wherever she went, she was dogged by the kind of rumors and insinuations that had helped to doom her abortive antislavery experiment at Nashoba. If in 1827, fears of racial “amalgamation” had been enough for erstwhile backers like Benjamin Lundy to withdraw support from Nashoba, by the mid-1830s, the mere mention of slavery or abolition was adequate cause for alarm. In Cincinnati, Wright cancelled a previously announced talk on slavery after the editor of the Cincinnati Gazette accused her of being an abolitionist. In a barely-veiled reference

2 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 176–83; John R. Commons, and Helen L. Sumner, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. V, Labor Movement, Volume 1 (Cleveland, OH: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), 146- 57, 165–82. 3 Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 186. The turpentine and gaslight episodes were described by William Leete Stone in the New York Commercial Advertiser, January 12 and 21, 1829.

86 to the rumors of sexual improprieties at Nashoba, the Gazette suggested that “even Madame

FWD [Frances Wright D’Arusmont], forgetting all her ancient amalgamation notions,” should have more prudence than to bring up the topic of slavery. In Philadelphia, the Whig Mayor prevented her from delivering an antislavery lecture; an official notice explained that “the subject is calculated to create an unpleasant excitement, and perhaps lead to a breach of the peace.”

When Wright suggested substituting a lecture on chartered monopolies instead, the authorities replied that she was banned from speaking in the city altogether. Never one to be cowed into submission, Wright briefly addressed “a large crowd of respectable citizens of both sexes” who gathered, despite a heavy downpour, to hear her speak at the site of the demolished Second Bank of the United States, a location charged with symbolism for her anti-bank Democratic followers.

After that gathering was broken up by “some half a dozen well known bank rioters,” the meeting was adjourned and moved to Falls of the Schuylkill, away from the city center. The promised lecture on slavery, however, was delayed and moved yet again, this time to a walled yard in the township of Blockley; and then again, to a wire factory on the outskirts of town. Despite the appearance of an overflow crowd, the antislavery lecture at the wire factory was ultimately broken up by a disturbance created by “boys urged on by men in genteel garb.”4

Back in New York, Wright blamed Whigs and “bank mobs” for the interruptions, while a hostile press alternately branded her a “‘British spy,’” a “‘Tappan abolitionist,’” or a “Federal whig ‘anti-abolitionist.’” The antislavery ideas Wright had pioneered at Nashoba had scarcely received a better reception in the metropolis, where, she recalled later, “every scheming rider of the Public took alarm; united to apply a gag to my woman’s mouth, & shouted ‘mad dog’ in order to prevent the force of opinion from coming so effectually to my rescue as to secure for me

4 Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 28 May 1836 and 4 June 1836, as quoted in Frances Wright D’Arusmont, Course of Popular Lectures, Historical and Political, as Delivered by Frances Wright D’Arusmont, Vol. II (Philadelphia: 1836), v–xxiv.

87 a hearing.” Invoking memories of the Great Fire that had laid waste to much of Manhattan in

1835, she recalled that her “peaceable proposal was met by a boo hurrah, as tho this great city was once again on fire.”5

Wright’s words were written against a backdrop of widespread hostility towards abolitionists in cities like New York and a general repression of antislavery sentiment throughout the North. In the summer of 1834, a series of anti-abolitionist riots tore through New York and other northern cities. In October of the following year, William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston by an angry mob—on the same day that Gerrit Smith witnessed another mob, this time in Utica, New York, forcibly breaking up an antislavery convention there.

In May 1836, the House passed the “gag rule,” automatically tabling antislavery resolutions and declaring that Congress had no authority to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed.

Other northerners petitioned to make disseminating abolitionist materials a criminal offense; murdered the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois; and burned down the site of an antislavery meeting in Philadelphia.6

Accordingly, many radical reformers tempered their antislavery rhetoric or subordinated it to the demands of partisan politics. When Wright finally managed to deliver her antislavery address at the wire factory on the outskirts of Philadelphia on July 30th, 1836, its contents were tepid when measured by her former standards. The North, Wright now claimed to believe, “has to amend her own fast-gathering and wide-spreading white slavery, before she can present any counsel to our southern brethren touching any judicious remedy to be applied to their black

5 Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, iv-v; Wright, “Speech at Concert Hall, New York,” 3 February 1839; Frances Wright, [Unpublished lecture], in Theresa Wolfson Papers, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. 6 On the 1834 riots, see Linda Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834,” New York History 48 (January 1967), 28–39; and Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). On the Utica riot and Gerrit Smith’s reaction, see John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 100–01.

88 slavery.” Since slavery was “without the pale of effective and beneficent legislation either national or of the southern states themselves,” the only viable solution was the introduction into the South of “enlightened white labor,” and the “civilization, enfranchisement, and colonization” of African Americans. Even more strikingly, Wright framed her personal experience of persecution for her antislavery beliefs in the partisan language and conspiratorial tones that marked much of the discussion of abolitionism in the 1830s. “I now fully know, what I formerly surmised,” she wrote to the National Laborer in the aftermath of the Philadelphia debacle, “that the question of slavery is at the present hour, throughout the whole American territory, made, openly or covertly, directly or indirectly, a pretext for the fomenting of disorder and the breeding of disunion.” Although she attacked those who prevented her from speaking out on slavery as the enemies of free speech, Wright blamed “bank mobs,” “whigs,” “federal intrigue,” and other

“prosecutors of productive laborers” for her misfortunes. Both the “false philanthropy” of abolitionism and the hysterical reactions of anti-abolitionist mobs were, Wright believed,

“working in concert... to promote the great Federal design of throwing all into confusion, and thus aiding transatlantic schemes for... the establishing throughout the civilized world one universal consolidated financial despotism.” In the fiercely partisan climate of Jacksonian

America, the once-expansive of radical Democrats like Wright now contracted to exclude all but the most directly pertinent issues. “The chartered monopoly question” became paramount; all other issues, Wright now proclaimed, were “but sham questions.”7

Many would-be radicals in the 1830s, including Wright, thus either tempered their antislavery rhetoric or subordinated it to the demands of partisan politics, as political loyalties, competing commitments to other reforms, and the emergence of a Jacksonian “producer’s

7 “Letter to Philadelphia National Laborer, June 23, 1836,” in Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, iv–v.

89 alliance” between northern farmers and laborers and southern slaveowners conspired to trump antislavery concerns in the 1830s. But in spite of these developments, many leading spokesmen for labor, as well as ordinary mechanics and small farmers in the North, were beginning to perceive that their interests as free laborers, inheritors of what they deemed a natural right to the soil, and enemies of the “Money Power,” put them at odds with the increasingly forceful defenders of the “.” Indeed, the very preoccupations to which workingmen subordinated the slavery question in the late 1820s and 1830s—outrage over banks and chartered monopolies; an emphasis on the conditions and hours of labor; concerns about concentrations of capital, the spread of wage labor and the threat posed by each to workingmen’s independence; demands for national public education and access to the public lands—would in time thrust them into a political alignment which few observers of the partisan politics of the Jacksonian Era might have predicted.8

Still other workingmen would attempt to carry the implications of “equal rights democracy” far beyond that which was deemed acceptable to most supporters of the Equal

Rights Party (as the Locofocos were officially known). These radical democrats found nothing inconsistent in championing antislavery alongside ten hours laws, anti-bank and anti-monopoly stances, and land reform measures they cherished. A handful, including Evans and Leggett, would brave the censure of public opinion and party to strongly denounce slavery and begin to lay the foundations for a political and constitutional antislavery that they claimed was fully consistent with the ideology of “equal rights.” While it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know how many rank-and-file Working Men or Locofocos were willing to follow this line of argument to similarly antislavery conclusions, a small group of pro-labor radicals based largely in New

8 As Jonathan Earle has recently pointed out, the term “Slave Power” was probably coined in 1836 by Thomas Morris, a hard-money Jacksonian and antislavery Democrat from Ohio. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 43–44.

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York and Philadelphia—a cohort which included William Heighton, Stephen Simpson, Thomas

Skidmore, John Commerford, George Henry Evans, William Leggett, and to a lesser degree

Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen—continued throughout the 1830s to develop the communitarian and agrarian ideas about free labor that had been percolating among Owenites, radical democrats, and Ricardian political economists over the previous decade. More impressively still, they pioneered an antislavery interpretation of the United States Constitution that would eventually provide the framework of an emerging antislavery politics.9

The connective strain running through the issues that demanded the attention of these workingmen reformers was an underlying concern with inequality and concentrations of private property. Locofocos and other radical Democrats opposed banks, paper money, and chartered corporations largely because they feared the antidemocratic power of such accumulations of capital. They objected to the awarding of contracts by the state to chartered corporations—the primary means by which most state-funded roads, canals, bridges, and turnpikes were constructed in the period—not because they were intrinsically opposed to such “internal improvements” or even to a role for the state in building them, but because they saw such charters as illicit “monopolies” that awarded public funds to private entities, a form of “special privilege” that was intolerable according to their understandings of the role of republican government. And they denounced speculation in land and the Whig policy of distributing the proceeds from land sales to the individual states, fearing that this would lead to the

9 For a different interpretation of Evans’ views on slavery and race, but one that I largely depart from, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 77–80.

91 monopolization of public land in the hands of a wealthy few, thus depriving the nation of its greatest resource and the people of their “natural right” to the soil.10

It was the espousal of such views that led the enemies of the Working Men, Locofocos, and radical elements of the labor movement to label them, with increasing vehemence as the

1830s progressed, as “agrarian.” So closely identified was the New York Working Men’s Party with ideas about the origins and just distribution of property that it was widely referred to as the

“Agrarian Party,” while the historian Carl Degler once depicted the Locofocos as “urban agrarians.” As implied by the pejorative sense in which the word was wielded by their political enemies, the Locofocos, Working Men, and others associated with antebellum labor reform were

“agrarians” in a double sense: not only did they seek a return to the land for salvation from the economic disruptions created by the rise of a market in wage labor; they often called for dramatic interventions into the reigning property regime based on land, slavery, and the concentrations of wealth made possible by the new innovations in speculative, market-based capitalism.11 As

Wright noted in 1830, “Of late, mingling with the old farcical cry of infidelity, has been heard the more novel and alarming cry of agrarianism. This last indeed would seem all but to have drowned the other...”12

10 John Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); 40, 79–80, 88–89, 98–99, 250–52. 11 Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V, 141–45, 149; Carl Degler, “The Locofocos: Urban ‘Agrarians’,” Journal of Economic History 16, No. 3 (September 1956), 322-33. Most studies of the ideology of the Locofocos and other Jacksonian radicals, however, have described them as “agrarian” in the narrower sense of upholding a back-to-the-land philosophy associated with the Jeffersonian yeoman tradition. On various usages and contemporary understandings of “agrarianism,” see Ashworth, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats,” 1, 99, 130–31, 184–85, 189; Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1948), 262–63; Thomas P. Govan, “Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words,” The Journal of Southern History 30, No. 1 (February, 1964). Govan notes that Noah Webster’s 1806 edition of his widely-read A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language defined agrarianism simply as “relating to an equal division of lands,” but by 1832 had added a quotation from that cast the former in a decidedly pejorative sense. 12 “Address, Containing a Review of the Times, As First Delivered in the Hall of Science, New-York On Sunday, May 9, 1830,” in Wright, Course of Popular Lectures, 3–20.

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Although labor reformers like Wright, Thomas Skidmore, and George Henry Evans usually either denied or attempted to qualify such charges of “agrarianism” in the 1830s, concentrations of landed and enslaved property were at the root of the excessive accumulations of wealth and power that they believed subverted the true potential of republican government, and redistributive programs were at the heart of the ameliorative solutions they hoped to apply.

By the mid-1830s, “agrarian” notions would show up most frequently in one of two forms: as a rhetorical weapon used by conservatives to attack a wide range of doctrines associated with dangerous radicalism, from advocacy of equal rights to abolitionism; and in calls to redistribute the vast amount of landed property embodied by the nation’s public lands to free workers.

Among the proposed resolutions of the first national convention, in New York in August 1834, of the National Trades Union—the first national labor organization in the country’s history— were the following:

RESOLVED, that this Convention deprecate the system now practised in the disposal of the

Public Lands, because of its violating the inherent rights of the citizens, seeing that the whole

of the unseated lands belong unto the people... and every citizen having a just claim to an

equitable portion thereof...

RESOLVED, that this Convention would the more especially reprobate the sale of the Public

Lands, because of its injurious tendency as it affects the interests and independence of the

laboring classes... owing to the many encroachments made upon them through the reduction

of wages of labor consequent upon its surplus quantity in the market, which surplus would be

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drained off, and a demand for the produce of mechanical labor increased, if these public lands

were left open to actual settlers.13

Thus were the seeds of what would eventually become the basis of a powerful political movement against slavery first sown by the Working Men’s movement and its ideological heirs in the labor movement of the 1830s. Over the next two decades, calls for the “freedom of the soil,” to which were added demands for the distribution of free homesteads, would become so pervasive that they would threaten to drown out other pro-labor measures, in addition to forming a source of frisson with competing reforms like antislavery. Indeed, before it could blossom into what would become known as “free soil,” this particular brand of labor agrarianism would undergo a trial by fire, one in which its antislavery implications would be effectively sidelined for a decade or more. It would take at least another decade for the antislavery implications of these agrarian and propertarian arguments to fully emerge. But contained within the attack on concentrations of wealth and landed property made by the early exponents of free soil was the germ of an attack on the largest concentration of property in the antebellum United States: the human property claimed by slaveholders.

The Philadelphia Working Men: Republican Free Soil and the Political Economy of Free Labor

It was no accident that the first political movement of workingmen in the United States developed in Philadelphia. There, a robust tradition of strike activity, artisan small producerism, and democratic radicalism set the stage for a fusion of trades union activism and the “Old

13 “Trades Union National Convention,” The Man 2 September 1834; National Trades’ Union, 6 Sept 1834; in John R. Commons and Helen L. Sumner, eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. VI, Labor Movement, 1840– 1860, Volume 2 (Cleveland, Oh.: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), 207–08. The NTU originated with a call from the New York General Trades’ Union to bring together local trade unions and city-based general organizations; by 1836 its activities had become focused largely on supporting strikes and agitating for ten-hours laws in addition to the freedom of the public lands. The organization held four national conventions before dissolving in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837. Commons, ed., Documentary History VI: 2, 191–93.

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School” Democracy represented by William Duane and Duane’s young protégé, Stephen

Simpson.14 A series of strikes throughout the preceding decade (there had been no fewer than ten in 1821 alone) culminated in the carpenters’ strike of 1827, in which journeymen house carpenters calling for a ten hour day were joined, first by bricklayers, painters, and glazers, and then by a host of unrelated trades which formed the country’s first general trades union, the

Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations (MUTA).15 The new organization’s stirring “Preamble” echoed the words of Jefferson’s Declaration and condemned “the evils which result from an unequal and very excessive accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.”16 The

Mechanics’ Free Press began publication earlier that year, and in July, 1828, the MUTA called for the nomination of candidates “who will support the interest of the working classes.” The

Philadelphia Working Men’s Party held its first public meeting on August 11th of that year.17

The figure behind the organization of both the Philadelphia Working Men and the MUTA was William Heighton, an English immigrant shoemaker, printer, and editor of the Mechanics’

Free Press. Little is known about Heighton’s early origins, but it is clear that he was steeped in the work of the English radical tradition; he was especially influenced by John Gray’s A Lecture on Human Happiness, which was first published in the United States in serial in the Mechanics’

Free Press during 1826. Heighton drew heavily on Gray’s ideas when shaping the ideology of the Philadelphia Working Men. In an early “Address to the Members of the Trade Societies,”

Heighton drew clear distinctions between “non-producers” and “producers”—he used the latter

14 See Chapter One, above, as well as Ronald Schultz, “Small Producer Thought in Early America, Part I: Philadelphia Artisans and Price Control,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 54, No. 2 (April 1987), 115–147. 15 Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 75–90; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 2005), 210–13, 282–83. 16 Mechanics’ Free Press, 28 October, 1828; quoted in Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 84. 17 “Preamble of the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations,” Mechanics’ Free Press, 25 October 1828, in Commons, and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 84–90; on the organization of the Working Men’s Party, see Mechanics’ Free Press, 5 July, 16 August, 1828. The “Preamble” was published in the MFP about a year after its organization.

95 term interchangeably with “working classes”—and offered perhaps the clearest articulation of the labor theory of value yet made on American shores. All wealth, Heighton insisted, was “the sole and exclusive product of LABOUR.” “It is not gold or silver,” Heighton continued, “nor the natural productions of the earth of themselves that constitute wealth, but THE LABOUR OF

MENS’ HANDS” that gave any commodity its value. This being the case, the producing class supported “not only themselves, but also every other individual in society.” Heighton’s

“Address” echoed Gray’s points about the irrationality of over-competition in an unfettered capitalist economy, adding insights drawn from Robert Owen about the perverse tendency of mechanization to exacerbate misery by reducing the need for labor and increasing production above and beyond the level of demand needed to sustain it. Neither political solutions nor trade unionism, Heighton proclaimed, could supply the answer to workingmen’s woes, “so long as the present wretched system of commerce is suffered to continue.”18

Heighton’s Mechanics’ Free Press published a notice from the American Daily

Advertiser lauding a recent speech by William Lloyd Garrison next to an extract from one of

Frances Wright’s lectures.19 In May 1830, when Garrison was still working as an assistant on

Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, the Mechanics’ Free Press declared its

“decided disapprobation” of the abolitionist’s imprisonment in Baltimore for attacking on what it called “the inhuman traffic of dealing in human flesh.” A week later, a letter to the editor urged

Heighton not to let the matter drop, noting that “as your paper is professedly designed to break down those distinctions that have arisen in our country so inimical to republicanism,” there was a

“peculiar propriety” in its objection to slavery. In a postscript, the letter writer urged Heighton to

18 “A Fellow Laborer” (William Heighton), Address to the Members of Trade Societies, and to the Working Classes Generally... (Philadelphia, 1827), 17–22. See also, “Competition,” Mechanics’ Free Press, 20 February 1830; 8 May 1830. 19 Mechanics’ Free Press, 12 September 1830.

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“enlist the working men of Baltimore in the cause of the oppressed” slaves; after all, hadn’t northern workingmen “known enough of oppression themselves to properly feel for others?”20

Elsewhere, the Mechanics’ Free Press published statistics on the horrors of the Brazilian slave trade, printed an antislavery allegory by Robert Dale Owen, and attacked the internal trade in the

U.S., quoting the American Spectator’s demand for “the immediate enactment of a law prohibiting... this wholesale traffic in human flesh.” Quoting a North Carolina emancipationist’s assertion that “our slave system is a radical evil...founded in injustice and cruelty,” Heighton editorialized that “every true laborer in the cause of philanthropy... must feel a sympathy with him, and understand the impulse which made him inscribe [antislavery] on his banner.”21

Despite the sweeping critique of antebellum society—including attacks on the persistence of slavery—made in the pages of the Mechanics’ Free Press, the demands of the Philadelphia

Working Men were relatively modest. Indeed, they were similar to those adopted by all of the

Working Men’s parties that soon spread to New York, Boston, and smaller cities throughout the

Northeast. In general, “Workies” denounced imprisonment for debt, paper money, banks, lotteries, and all forms of “chartered monopoly”; the most common solutions proposed were those calling for ten-hour laws, mechanics’ lien laws, and state-funded public education. The demand for free, public education was particularly important to Heighton; echoing the proposals of Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen, he repeatedly called for a -funded system of

“republican education” for the children of the working class in speeches and in the pages of the

Mechanics’ Free Press.22

20 Ibid., 30 May 1830; 5 June 1830. 21 Ibid., 9 January, 27 March, 11 September, 24 April 1830. 22 On the Philadelphia Working Men and education, see Heighton’s “Address” as well as the “Circular” from the Working Men’s Republican Association of the Northern , Mechanics’ Free Press, 17 April 1830; “Address of the Working Men’s Republican Association of the Northern Liberties to their Brethren of the City and County of Philadelphia,” 1 97

But foregrounding all of the Philadelphia Working Men’s proposals was another strain of thought, one that provided ideological justification for universal public education but also suggested a means towards broader social goals. In October, 1828, the Working Men drew up a petition to be presented at the Second Session of the Twentieth U.S. Congress, set to convene that December. Published in the Mechanics’ Free Press and possibly composed by Heighton himself, the petition respectfully recommended “the propriety of placing all the Public Lands, without the delay of sales, within the reach of the people at large, by the right of a title to occupancy only.” All men, the petitioners held, had “naturally, a birth-right in the soil”; if this right was denied, “they may be deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The petitioners recommended that the Public Lands “be reserved as a donation to the citizens of the

United States in the character of perpetual leases, free from rent,” subject to revert back to government control only if the landholder should fail to occupy or improve the lands.

Speculators and others who had existing claims to titles on the public lands, but who had no intention of occupying them themselves, would simply be refunded at cost. Since “a true spirit of independence can not be enjoyed, by the great body of the People, nor the exercise of freedom secured to them,” without the recognition of a natural right to the land, free land grants along with strong deterrents to speculation would be “the only effectual prevention of future monopoly and the best safeguard of the American Republic.”23 Subsequently, the Mechanics’ Free Press ran a column dedicated “To industrious mechanics with small available capitals,” urging them to

May 1830 (directing readers to the New York Sentinel’s series of essays on public education); “Working Men’s Meeting,” 10 July 1830. 23 “Memorial to Congress,” Mechanics’ Free Press, 25 October 1828; in Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 43–45.

98 pool their resources and become proprietors of the soil in small, self-sustaining communities similar to those promoted by the Owenites of the previous decade.24

If the Philadelphia Working Men can be credited with one of the first formal demands for what working-class land reformers of the next decade would term “free soil,” Stephen Simpson,

Heighton’s successor as leader of the Philadelphia Workies, developed one of the more sophisticated arguments associated with “free labor” in the period. The son of a Bank of the

United States official and an ardent anti-Jacksonian, Simpson nevertheless became a protégé of

William Duane and the Philadelphia Working Men’s candidate for Congress in 1830.25 Unlike

National Republican supporters of the B.U.S., but in common with the English radicals and republicans described in Chapter One, Simpson associated the origins of inequality with monopoly and slavery. The “inequality of property in this country,” Simpson argued, had originated in two causes, “the monopoly of land”—which had itself been established only by the expropriation and destruction of “nation after nation of defenceless [sic] Indians”—and secondly, the monopoly of capital and credit, exacerbated by the Federalists’ plan for publicly-funded repayment of the national debt.

If the monopolization of land and capital at the nation’s founding were the fount of its existing inequalities, even deeper historical associations between labor and servile status were responsible for labor’s current degradation in Simpson’s analysis. “To labour for another, even among us of the 19th century, is held as disreputable,” Simpson observed. From ancient Egypt,

Greece, and Rome, to the feudal barons of , France, and Britain, to the present-day rule

24 Mechanics’ Free Press, 22, 29 May; 5, 12 June; 14 August; 4 December 1830. 25 On Simpson, see Edward Pessen, “The Ideology of Stephen Simpson, Underclass Champion of the Early Philadelphia Workingmen’s Movement,” Pennsylvania History 22, no. 4 (October, 1955) 328–40; Pessen, Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany: State University of New York, 1967), 75–79, 105–08; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 211–13 and passim; Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 87–88.

99 of slaveowners in the South and of “Capital, Banks, and Monopoly” in the North, laboring for someone other than one’s self had always been associated with servility and dependence. What all these forms had in common was a relationship marked by “power, instead of justice.” Wage labor was no different in this respect, since the power relations that determined and regulated wages stemmed not from the hidden hand of the free market but from “masters, not less absolute than a South Carolina slave-holder.” Since “labor was the parent of all wealth,” it was “self- evident” that the “industry” of the individual ought to determine its distribution, rather than

“laws that have their origin in despotism, and customs founded upon the antiquated relations of master and slave.”26

Simpson made a related free labor argument on more familiar, Smithian grounds: slave labor, he argued, was “unproductive” when compared to free labor. This was naturally so, since slaves had to be fed, clothed, and sheltered; while “non-consuming agents of labour” like the free wage labor of the North were “far more profitable, than those which consume.” Here lay the seeds of the South’s discontent over the tariff issue, which had not yet exploded into the “crisis” of nullification; northern workers manufactured goods while consuming very little, while southerners persisted in the “expensive plan of consuming labor,” forced to import farm implements, food, and textiles from the North or from Europe.27

In an article on the economics of the slaveholding plantation, published in the Mechanics’

Free Press that year, Simpson astutely analyzed the ways that slaveholders used their enslaved labor force to create surplus value. The Louisiana sugar planter’s “slaves are his working men,”

26 Stephen Simpson, The Working Man’s Manual: A New Theory of Political Economy (Philadelphia: Thomas L. Bonsal, 1831). 27 Ibid., 219–20. Simpson’s free-labor assumptions have since been cast into considerable doubt by the work of the cliometric historians of the 1970s as well as a raft of recent research suggesting that not only did slave plantations often produce enough food to be self-sufficient, but their output suggests levels of productivity in many ways comparable to the free labor economy of the North.

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Simpson reminded his readers, as well as his biggest capital expenditure; “they plough the ground, plant the cane, gather it, press it, and perform every office of labour.” “Take away his slaves,” Simpson suggested, and the slaveowner “will never produce another crop—Yet the capital remains entire, though it fails to produce the increase.” The labor of enslaved people, not the “inert and passive mass of capital,” was what added the value to the slaveowner’s initial outlay; it was “the efficient cause of his wealth.” The same held true, Simpson claimed, for the

“stockholder capitalist” and others who employed various forms of “fictitious capital” to purchase labor, since the laborer effectively paid back the capital, plus interest, used to hire his or her labor. A “true and just mode of distributing labour” could only be carried on by exchanging the product of labor for something of like value, whether a usable commodity or its equivalent in hard currency. But “the moment it is effected by bank bills, funded debt, or any capital of a fictitious character,” a species of fraud was introduced, leading to the creation of an aristocracy whose power was built on monopoly. What was monopoly? Simpson asked. “Capital combined, to acquire the product of labor for more than value.” Not only did this allow “the idle few [to] grow rich, and the industrious majority remain poor,” but it denied the laboring majority—those without collateral in the form of land, slaves, or capital—access to credit, thus subjecting them, by “a double act of injustice and oppression,” to “poverty and want.”28

Such free labor arguments gained a wide currency among labor reformers of the time.

Among them was Samuel Whitcomb, Jr., a journalist, education reformer, and member of the

Working Men’s Party of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Like Simpson, Whitcomb blamed both low wages and the view of manual labor as “disreputable and menial” on its long association with slavery and . Whitcomb’s protectionism might have easily led him to the nativism and

28 Mechanics’ Free Press, 4 December 1830. For slaves as “fixed capital”: see Ralph V. Anderson and Robert E. Gallman, “Slaves as Fixed Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic Development,” Journal of American History, 64, no. 1 (June 1977): 24–46.

101 anti-black prejudice that shaped many antebellum labor reformers’ worldviews; as he bitterly noted, a favorite tactic of capitalists was to “import from other regions, where the work is still performed by serfs or slaves, the products extorted from them,” thus forcing native-born free laborers into “a ruinous competition with those unfortunate fellow beings.” But instead, he combined pro-tariff protectionism with an early form of free-labor internationalism: “here we see,” he insisted, “the connexion, and sympathy of interest that exists, and ought to be felt, between the labouring and producing classes of mankind, in all countries, and throughout the world... No wonder then, when all the working men of Europe, Asia, and Africa are in a state of comparative slavery, that we, of America, should find it necessary to interpose the strong arm of government to protect and cherish our own industry.”29 Whitcomb was referring to his support for protective tariffs, a position which, at the time, made him somewhat anomalous among labor radicals. But as we shall see, even those who, like the Working Men and Locofocos, generally supported “laissez faire in politics as in political economy,” often did not hesitate to turn to “the strong arm of government” to make arguments for the restriction of slavery or for the granting of public lands to non-slaveholding settlers.30

Both Simpson and Whitcomb rejected the simplistic comparisons between slavery and

“wage slavery” that proved so irresistible to other labor reformers in the period. Direct comparisons between manufacturing workers and slaves or serfs may have held water in Britain, whose factory workers comprised “a serf class,” but not in the United States, where “our operatives are freemen.” Thus Jefferson had been mistaken to call for limiting manufacturing to

29 Samuel Whitcomb, Jr., An Address Before the Working-Men’s Society of Dedham, Delivered on the Evening of September 7, 1831 (Dedham, Mass: L. Powers, 1831), 7–8. On Whitcomb, see also Robert Abzug, “The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists’ Fears of Slave Violence,” The Journal of Negro History 55, no. 1 (January 1970): 15–26. 30 Report and Constitution, or Plan of Organization of the Democratic Party, in Favor of Equal Rights, and Opposed to All Monopolies by Legislation, As Submitted By the General Convention, and Adopted by the General County Meeting In the City of New-York (New York: Windt and Conrad, 1836), 3–4.

102 the workshops of Europe (a perhaps understandable oversight, in Simpson’s opinion, since

Jefferson had written “under the influence of an atmosphere, tainted with slavery, and where none but slaves laboured”). And although he stopped short of making common cause with enslaved workers or making an outright claim for abolition, Simpson’s version of “wage slavery” did not preclude the possibility of such a , since “the spirit which operated to the vassalage and depression of our Working People” was “the same spirit that introduced the

SLAVE trade, and peopled our southern plantations with a human race, doomed to eternal toil.”

Most importantly, Simpson recognized that although the abolition of “every vestige of bondage and servitude” was not “entirely efficient in itself,” it was nonetheless “an indispensible prerequisite” to raising free labor to a position of “honour and merit.” The eradication of slavery was thus essential to bringing about the liberation of laborers more generally.31

The New York Working Men: Agrarian Antislavery and the Afterlife of Owenite Reform

In New York City, the Working Men’s calls for both the distribution of land and wealth would take on yet more radical form. Indeed, the New York Working Men were so closely identified with the ideas about the origins and just distribution of property that they were widely referred to as the “Agrarian Party.”32 Like their compatriots in Philadelphia, the New York

Working Men traced their origins to a strike. On April 23rd, 1829, a meeting of “mechanics” pledged not to work for any employer who would not agree to a maximum working day of ten hours. The mechanics framed their demands in terms that would have been familiar to the

Philadelphia artisans of the “Committee on Prices” of 1779. Since “all men hold their property by the consent of the great mass of the community,” and since non-property-owners had given up

31 Ibid., 30–31, 15, 85–86, 135, 15n, 49, 16–17. 32 Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 141–45, 149.

103 claims to an equal share of property upon leaving the “state of nature,” laborers were entitled to both “an equal participation” in politics and the “enjoyments of a comfortable subsistence” in their daily lives. According to this workingmen’s reformulation of the Lockean social compact, those employers who withheld employment or demanded excessive toil in the form of twelve- or fourteen-hour days had “contravene[d] the first law of society.” Five days after the April 23rd meeting, a crowd estimated at between five and six thousand turned out at a public meeting on the Bowery to hear resolutions declaring that “in the first formation of government, no man gives up to others his original right of soil” without receiving “a guaranty that reasonable toil shall enable him to live as comfortable [sic] as others.” If workers were not to receive an actual share of land or other productive property, society owed them a fair equivalent.

The meeting then appointed a Committee of Fifty, comprised of “a large number of hands, and a large majority... of journeymen,” to report on workers’ conditions and voice their grievances. That committee’s report, presented at a public meeting held at Military Hall on

Wooster Street on October 19th, began with the proposition that “human society, our own as well as every other, is constructed radically wrong.” The error, the Committee believed, had derived from “the first foundation of government in this state [in which] the division of the soil should have been equal.” The Committee proceeded to lay out a number of what had by then become the standard Workie demands—the abolition of banks, chartered monopolies, and imprisonment for debt; mechanics’ lien laws; electoral reforms—but only after calling for a political revolution that would leave “no trace of that government which has denied to every human being AN

EQUAL AMOUNT OF PROPERTY,” not to mention food, clothing, and a publicly-funded education. The Report characterized the condition of workingmen as tantamount to slavery.

Rejecting the liberal definition of free labor as self-ownership governed by freedom of contract,

104 the workingmen argued that there was little practical difference whether one was enslaved under the Lockean justification of being taken captive in war, “or whether the sword of want extort our consent, as it were, to a voluntary slavery, through a denial to us of all the materials of nature, which are the common and equal right of all...” 33

The author of the Report of the Committee of Fifty was Thomas Skidmore. Born in

Connecticut in 1790, Skidmore later recalled that he had thrilled to William Duane’s Aurora as a young boy; later, he devoured Paine, Jefferson, Locke, Rousseau on politics and Ricardo and

Raymond on economics. After drifting up and down the eastern seaboard, where he worked as a machinist and inventor, he became involved in politics as a delegate to the city nominating convention in 1828—not as a Jacksonian, but as a National Republican. Nor was Skidmore’s support for Adams in 1828 anomalous; he continued to support the National Republican program of tariffs and internal improvements even as a candidate of the increasingly Jacksonian-leaning

Working Men. But in the first year of Jackson’s presidency, he published a nearly 400-page tract that would scandalize conservatives and moderates in both parties. The Right of Man to

Property! held that all property was illegitimate, since the basis of its ownership was constructed on the illegitimate foundation of the unequal and forceful distributions that had preceded the formation of governments. The solution, Skidmore proposed, was a “General Division” in which state constitutional conventions would be formed, property would be seized and redistributed, inheritance abolished, and all citizens, upon reaching the age of maturity, would receive an

33 New York Morning Courier, 25 April, 30 April 1829; Working Man’s Advocate, 31 October 1829; in Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:I, 146–56; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 191–94; George Henry Evans, “History of the Origins and Progress of the Working Men’s Party of New York,” Radical, January 1842. The last quote from the Report is from Evans’ “History” in the Radical, February 1843.

105 equivalent in return for the landed property that been usurped back at the murky origins of civilization.34

Skidmore’s radicalism, however, was not limited to his views on the illegitimacy of landed property or its offspring, the accumulation of excessive wealth. The Right of Man to

Property! also attacked the institution of slavery at its very foundations. Scrutinizing the origins of private property, Skidmore drew a direct correlation between the origins of property in land and that of property in human beings. It was self-evident, Skidmore thought, that if slavery had suddenly taken root on American soil after the Revolution, “all our governments, both State and

National, would have directed their efforts to destroy it immediately, and to prevent its further introduction among us.” Much like slavery, the vast landed estates of the wealthy were the tainted legacy of aristocratic Europe, not republican America. Both derived their titles from

“grants made by our proprietary governors” and “the governments of Europe,” but “the people of this country in forming a government for themselves, would never have sanctioned” either.

Unlike others inspired by Jeffersonian antislavery, however, Skidmore did not stop at this

Jeffersonian attempt to shift the blame for the introduction of slavery onto America’s European predecessors. Rather, he continued in this line of reasoning to argue for the emancipation of blacks in the South and their enfranchisement in the North. Racism, Skidmore believed, was not an insurmountable obstacle to emancipation, for it was “possible” that the poor southern white could “renounce his prejudices against the slaves and to admit that it is no more consistent with right, that the slaves should be subservient to him, than it is for the poor white man, to be subservient to the rich one.” That effected, the slaves themselves “might at once be admitted to

34 Skidmore, Right of Man to Property! (New York, 1829). Although many historians concerned of the period have evinced a fascination with Skidmore and his proposal for wealth redistribution, often assuming he represented a primitive early , few have paid serious attention to his antislavery proposals. See Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 184–88; Gourevitch, Cooperative Commonwealth, 78–82.

106 an equal participation.” Objections to emancipation on the part of southern whites might be further overcome if, upon gaining their freedom, former slaves were “presented with lands, and other property also.” Thus enabled to become self-sufficient, nothing short of white prejudice could circumvent “this easy and natural method of extinguishing slavery, and its ten thousand attendant evils.”35

Unlike later working-class land reformers, however, Skidmore did not demand land redistribution as a precondition for either emancipation or . Rather, he recognized how interconnected the issues of property ownership and voting rights were, especially in New York, where the 1821 state constitution had eliminated property requirements for whites while raising them for blacks. “The former existence of slavery among us” was no reason to deny blacks the vote, for “the black man’s right to suffrage is as perfect as the white man’s”; no government could “uncreate” such a right. Just as emancipation made little sense if not accompanied by the right to own property, the redistribution of land would be an absurdity under New York’s 1821 constitution; for without the franchise, there was “no power, but unlawful force, with which he may defend his property.” A political revolution was thus possible and desirable even as an antecedent to the propertarian revolution Skidmore called for. Pursuing this line of logic still further, Skidmore declared that women, too, should be given the right of suffrage. Native

Americans, he believed, were entitled to the same rights to the possession of their lands as whites, while equally subject to having any excessively large landholdings broken up. Under the present circumstances, Skidmore admitted, such reforms might not yet be feasible. But “the day of inquiry into rights,” he believed, was “yet in its morning.”36

35 Skidmore, Right of Man to Property!, 54–55, 58–59. 36 Ibid., 54–55, 58–59, 158, 270–71.

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Somewhat ironically, Skidmore’s principle challengers for leadership of the New York

Working Men were two figures who also combined abolitionism with women’s rights and calls for the redistribution of property. Ensconced in their Hall of Science headquarters, Frances

Wright and Robert Dale Owen began to flesh out their ideas for the emancipation of the working classes in the pages of their weekly, the Free Enquirer. The answer, they now believed more than ever, was education. In New York, Wright and Owen refined and developed the educational approach they had pioneered at New Harmony and Nashoba into what they deemed the “state guardianship plan.” A curious mixture of republican egalitarianism and paternalistic utopianism, the plan called for the establishment of secular, publicly-funded boarding schools where children from age two to sixteen would be removed from the “rudeness, impertinent language, vulgar manners, and vicious habits” that characterized the environment of the urban poor, and subjected to an almost authoritarian oversight, with only infrequent visits from parents allowed.37

At the October 19th meeting of the Committee of Fifty, Owen, by then recognized as a spokesman for the Working Men, was drafted into service as the secretary of the meeting which nominated the Working Men’s first candidates for state office. The Committee endorsed some version of Owen and Wright’s plan for national education, and its nominations for the state assembly included several Owenites. But the resulting election was a victory for the Skidmore faction, which made a strong showing in the city’s poorer wards.38 Despite his prior support for the equalization of property he had voiced at New Harmony, Owen was alarmed by the success

37 For descriptions of the state guardianship plan proposed by Owen and Wright, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 178– 79; New-York Sentinel and Working Man’s Advocate, 19 June 1830, in Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, , 165–174; New Harmony and Nashoba Gazette, 29 October, 5, 12, 19 November 1828, 7, 14 January 1829; Free Enquirer 4 March, 22 April, 6, 13, 20, 27 May, 3 June, 29 July, 7 November 1829, 1 May 1830. The Philadelphia Working Men, probably influenced by Owen, also called for the incorporation of manual labor training into public schools, citing Owen’s alma mater Fellenberg as exemplary. “Report of the [Philadelphia] Working Men’s Committee,” Working Man’s Advocate, 6 March 1830, in Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 94–107. 38 Although the election represented a victory for Tammany-affiliated Democrats, the Workies won a plurality of votes in the Eighth and Tenth Wards, and a majority in the Thirteenth; the Working Men elected one candidate to the assembly, and Skidmore himself lost by only twenty-three votes. See Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 198–99, especially “Table 17,” p. 408.

108 of the Skidmorites, and now attempted to distance himself from the brand of agrarianism represented by the Committee of Fifty’s resolution. With the Skidmorites flush with victory, and with Wright away on speaking tours (and, after November 1829, preoccupied with the removal of the Nashoba slaves to Haiti) Owen sought to consolidate control of the Working Men in support of the state guardianship plan. To that end, he helped fund the establishment of the

Working Man’s Advocate, a new journal edited by George Henry Evans. Meanwhile, a third faction of “Working Men,” emerged, comprised of more cautious master artisans, manufacturers, and shopkeepers, many of them ex-Adams supporters who now supported Noah Cook, a merchant and entrepreneur, and Henry Guyon, a master carpenter.39

All of these factions now united to denounce the “wild Agrarian scheme” of the

Skidmorites, with one group of Owen supporters circulating a handbill signed by a “Real

Working Man” who renounced the “deluded” efforts of the “Agrarian Minority.”40 Pro-

Tammany journals and conservative dailies alike blasted the “agrarianism” represented by the rise of a “party founded on the most alarming principles.”41 There was, of course, a certain irony to the Owenite faction’s denunciation of agrarianism, not only because Owen and Wright themselves had formerly advocated some form of the equalization of property, but because the conservative and business press saw little distinction between the Owenites and the pro-

39 On Cook and Guyon, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 189–90. For the occupational breakdown of the various factions of New York Working Men, see Table 18, 409. Significantly, Evans sided with the Owen/Wright faction in the dispute. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 180–83, 192–208; Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History V:1, 149–82. Evans’ connections to Owenite reform are explained in Chapter Four, below. 40 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 203. Skidmore claimed, and Wilentz seems to support, the conclusion that George Henry Evans played a role in writing the handbill. See also “To the Mechanics and Working-Men of the Fifth Ward, And those friendly to their Interests,” (New York: n.d.), which informed voters that “Infidelity and Agrarianism” were the “leading principles” of the Owen-Wright faction. 41 Evening Journal, 30 December 1829; Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 4 November 1829.

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Skidmore Working Men, both of which it stigmatized as the “Fanny Wright ticket.”42 Back in

Philadelphia, William Heighton lamented the “differences with the Working Men at New York,” giving roughly equal column space to both the Skidmore and Owen factions.43 Then, at a meeting of some three thousand at Manhattan’s Military Hall on December 29th, a combination of the supporters of Noah Cook and Robert Dale Owen overwhelmed the Skidmorites, dissolved the

Committee of Fifty, and passed a host of resolutions that retained the producerist language of the workingmen, but now stripped them of their agrarian implications. Despite Skidmore’s plea that his was a “modern agrarianism,” in which all citizens, upon “commencing the career of life” would be granted “the same equal property to pursue it with,” he had lost control of the movement he had done so much to ignite.44 Cook’s supporters, now denouncing the Owenites as well as the Skidmore men, effectively took control of the Working Men’s label at an upstate party convention and openly declared their support for Henry Clay. In the state elections of 1830, pro-Jackson Tammany candidates filled the resulting void, reversing the Working Men’s gains in the city wards that had voted for them in 1829 (the Cookites came in second, while Owenites garnered only 2,200 votes and Skidmore’s new “Poor People’s Party” fewer than 200).45

The New York Working Men were finished as a viable political movement. Although

George Henry Evans would continue to publish his Working Man’s Advocate well into the next

42 Commercial Advertiser, 23 October 1829. Earlier, the Commercial Advertiser had pronounced the original resolutions on property of the April 23 Working Men as “a suitable text for Fanny Wright to discourse upon,” adding that the workingmen “could not have understood their own resolutions.” Commercial Advertiser, 25 April 1829. 43 The Mechanics’ Free Press printed Skidmore’s letter to Robert Dale Owen’s Free Enquirer, and Owen’s response, in their entirety. See Mechanics’ Free Press, 23 January, 1830; also the notice of Skidmore’s newspaper The Friend of Equal Rights, in MFP 8 May 1830. But given the Philadelphia Working Men’s emphasis on “republican education,” it seems likely that most (and surely Heighton) would have supported Owen’s vision of general education and the voluntary association of property in worker-organized communities. 44 Friend of Equal Rights, quoted in the Mechanics’ Free Press, 8 May 1830. See also Skidmore and Alexander Ming, Jr. to Robert Dale Owen, and Owen’s repsonse, Mechanics’ Free Press, 23 January 1830. 45 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 209–10. On the rise and fall of the New York Working Men, see Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 353–55; HW (Hobart) Berrian, Brief Sketch of the Origin and Rise of the Workingmen’s Party (Washington, D.C., 1840?); and George Henry Evans’ essays on the “History of the Origin and Progress of the Working Men’s Party in New York,” in the Radical, published between January 1842 and April 1843.

110 decade, and would help to organize a Workingmen’s Political Association that carried on some of the efforts of the Workies, by 1832 had turned somewhat reluctantly to support for Jackson, joined by many former Owenites.46 Owen himself withdrew to Europe and then to New

Harmony, where he would launch a career as a successful antislavery politician; Wright would continue to be a popular speaker before workingmen’s audiences in New York, but would never again enjoy her former influence.47

As Evans realized later, however, the ideologies of the Owen and Skidmore factions had never really been that far apart; both sought to overcome the obstacles to equality that had been brought about by pre-existing property arrangements and artificial distinctions of wealth, whether in land, enslaved human beings, or the accumulation of capital. Both groups hoped not to abolish property but to bring about a society in which every citizen would have an equal chance, based on industry and ability, to become property-owners– Skidmore by wiping the slate clean of the inherited product of past accumulations; Owen, Wright, and Heighton by providing equal education at the public expense.

Meanwhile, an ideological and political commitment to “agrarianism” would linger as a potent legacy of the Working Men’s movement. To be sure, most labor reformers renounced the version represented by Skidmore’s call for an equal division. The New England carpenter Seth

Luther told an audience in 1834 that “we are accused of a wish to divide property; to take from those who have, and give to those who have not... this statement of our views is false, utterly, totally, and maliciously false. All we wish is to be paid a fair equivalent for our labor... We claim

46 On the Workingmen’s Association, see “Working Men’s Meeting,” “Memorial to the State Legislature of New York,” “Plan of Organization” and “Constitution,” all in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Philadelphia workingmen organized a “Workingmen’s Republican Political Association” around the same time. On Evans’ support for Jackson, see Working Man’s Advocate, 24 March 1832. “Although many of the working men might not approve of all the conduct and measures of Andrew Jackson,” Evans wrote, “there are few who do not prefer him for his support of some of the most important measures which the working men advocate.” 47 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 201–211.

111 for labor, the source of all wealth, a reward commensurate with its usefulness.”48 “It is a perversion of the aims of the enlightened advocates of labour,” Stephen Simpson chimed in, “to represent that they are contending for an equality of wealth, or a community of property.”

Working-class producers merely demanded an “equality of rights to what we produce”—what others called a right to the fruit of their labor.49 In most of its iterations in the antebellum period, this meant a right to the ownership of productive property. Some workers, it is true, would call for the abolition of the wage system entirely in favor of a right to the “whole product of labor,” in the form of labor-for-labor exchanges, producers’ cooperatives, or the organization of labor in cooperative communities. Still others insisted that excessive accumulations of wealth “must necessarily, impoverish others in the same proportion that they enrich the possessor” and furthermore that such concentrations bequeathed to their owners a power tantamount to that of slaveholders over their slaves, so that “every accession of wealth... to an individual in any community is an accession of poverty or slavery to every other individual within the sphere of his influence.”50 But by the mid-1830s, “agrarian” notions would show up most frequently in one of two forms: as a rhetorical weapon used by conservatives to attack a wide range of doctrines associated with democratic radicalism, from advocacy of equal rights to abolitionism; and in calls to redistribute to free white producers the vast amount of landed property embodied by the nation’s public lands. Thus the National Trades Union, the first national organization of

American trades organized by , John Commerford and other veterans of the Working

Men’s movement, proposed the following resolutions at their first national convention in New

48 Seth Luther, An Address on the Origin and Progress of Avarice, and Its Deleterious Effects on Human Happiness, (Boston, 1834). 49 Stephen Simpson, Working Man’s Manual, 18, 27–28, 137–38, 213. The equal division of land that characterized Roman agrarianism, Simpson argued, had proven “fleeting [and] ineffectual.” Simpson denied, however, that “a tax to support common schools would be an Agrarian Law”; if that were the case, all just laws were properly “agrarian,” since “the rich pay more than the poor individually, though not collectively, for the support of government.”49 50 National Laborer, April 9, 1839.

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York in August 1834, right behind a resolution calling for an “Equal, Universal, Republican system of Education”:

RESOLVED, that this Convention deprecate the system now practised in the disposal of the

Public Lands, because of its violating the inherent rights of the citizens, seeing that the whole

of the unseated lands belong unto the people... and every citizen having a just claim to an

equitable portion thereof...

RESOLVED, that this Convention would the more especially reprobate the sale of the Public

Lands, because of its injurious tendency as it affects the interests and independence of the

laboring classes... owing to the many encroachments made upon them through the reduction

of wages of labor consequent upon its surplus quantity in the market, which surplus would be

drained off, and a demand for the produce of mechanical labor increased, if these public lands

were left open to actual settlers.51

The seeds of what would eventually become the basis of a powerful political movement against slavery were thus first sown by the Working Men’s movement and its immediate ideological inheritors. But before it could blossom into what would become known as Free Soil, this particular brand of working-class agrarianism would undergo a trial by fire, one in which its antislavery implications would be effectively sidelined for a decade or more.

George Henry Evans, William Leggett, and the Evolution of Equal Rights Antislavery

By the time that an agitated crowd descended on lower Manhattan’s Chatham Street

Chapel on the evening of July 9th, 1834, touching off three nights of anti-abolitionist rioting,

51 “Trades Union National Convention,” The Man, 2 September 1834; National Trades’ Union, 6 Sept 1834; in Commons and Sumner, eds., Documentary History VI: 2, 207–08. The NTU originated with a call from the New York General Trades’ Union to bring together local trade unions and city-based general organizations; by 1836 its activities had become focused largely on supporting strikes and agitating for ten-hours laws in addition to the freedom of the public lands. The organization held four national conventions before dissolving in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837. Commons, ed., Documentary History VI: 2, 191–93.

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New York had already witnessed so many civic disturbances that 1834 would go down in the city’s history as the “year of the riots”—a noteworthy distinction in a city already known for interethnic conflicts, urban poverty, and a tradition of unruly mob behavior.52 Skilled laborers and tradesmen, including shoemakers, masons, carpenters, and tailors, may have made up the largest percentage of the rioters on those sweltering July nights in 1834. But “gentlemen of property and standing”—merchants, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, and other native-born leading citizens—were far more likely to have been both the organizers of anti-abolition mobs and the largest occupational grouping within them in the 1830s.53 John B. Jentz’s important but overlooked study of New York in the decade concluded that the majority of signers of antislavery petitions were artisans and small shopkeepers, and that the number of signers of low or modest wealth and occupational status increased as the decade progressed. The same study identified over seventy signers of antislavery petitions in the 1830s who had participated in the

Working Men’s movement of the previous decade.54

Whatever the actual proportion of workingmen that took part in anti-abolition riots, workingmen also took the lead in denouncing them. Indeed, two working printer-editors, George

Henry Evans, editor of the Working Man’s Advocate and an ally of Frances Wright’s faction of

52 Between April and August of that year, at least five major disturbances took place in New York, including a “stonecutters’ riot” in which stonecutters, masons, and others in the buildings trade became outraged by the use of marble finished by prison labor at Sing Sing. An outbreak of cholera had ravaged the city earlier in the summer. 53 Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing, 113–22, 152. Despite the association of these earlier riots with labor disputes and economic hard times, Richards found little evidence to support the once-common explanation that the July riots were fueled by economic fears of competition with free blacks (he posited instead that fears of racial “amalgamation,” exacerbated by the relatively high percentage of free blacks living in the working-class Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Tenth Wards, as a major cause of the New York Riots). In Utica in 1835, for example, fully 78 per cent of the anti-abolition mob was composed of commercial and professional men, while small manufacturers and tradesmen comprised only 15 per cent of the rioters, as compared to 56 per cent of the abolitionists. Such findings are in keeping with contemporary accounts by abolitionists themselves, which depicted a “head and tail” alliance between proslavery merchants, politicians, and clergymen ranged against the “hard-handed, clear-headed, free laborers, and mechanics of the North.” See Richards, Gentlemen, 132–155. 54 John B. Jentz, “The Antislavery Constituency in Jacksonian New York City,” Civil War History 27, No. 2 (June 1981), 101–122; see especially “Table 2,” 119. Jentz’s list of 850 Working Men was compiled by Walter Hugins. Among the signers of antislavery petitions was the influential journeyman carpenter, GTU/NTU organizer, and land reformer John Commerford, mentioned above and in Chapter Four. See also Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Profile of the Abolitionist Constituency (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1986).

114 the Working Men’s Party, and William Leggett, of the Evening Post and the Plaindealer, were nearly alone among New York newspaper editors of either party affiliation in condemning both the rioters and their intentions.55 To be sure, such a denunciation did not necessarily translate into support for abolitionists. Evans, like Wright, blamed the riots on “Bank wigs” [sic], the conservative press, and the influence of “Southern money,” and thought that Garrisonian immediatists were “actuated by a fanatical enthusiasm.” But unlike James Waston Webb, the vituperative editor of the mercantile sheet the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, Evans believed that the abolitionists were “honest in their principles and the measures they propose are just.”56

The anti-abolition riots of 1834 found both Evans and Leggett in the midst of an antislavery evolution. Although that evolution would ultimately lead the two men towards distinctly different conclusions, it underscored the commitment of each to following the implications of “equal rights democracy” far beyond that which was deemed acceptable to most white Americans of the time. Moreover, while it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know how many of their working-class readers were willing to follow them to the same conclusions, both made substantial contributions to the constitutional arguments that, along with ideas about free soil and free labor, were beginning to provide the framework of an emerging antislavery politics.57

Evans had launched his weekly, the Working Man’s Advocate, at the height of the

Working Men’s movement of 1829. Somewhat reluctantly, he helped steer the remainder of the

55 Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 30-31. 56 The Man, June, 9; July 17, 19, 1834; New York Evening Post, 8 July 1834; Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing, 113–22. Jonathan H. Earle has done an admirable job illuminating the antislavery careers of both Evans and Leggett, but their stories bear repeating here. See Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 19–37 and passim. 57 For a different interpretation of Evans’ views on slavery and race, but one that I depart from, see David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 77–80.

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Working Men towards support for Jackson and the Democratic Party.58 Unlike many northern

Democrats, however, Evans never reconciled himself to the Jacksonian alliance between northern workingmen and southern slaveowners. Rather, he was conspicuous for his status as one among a handful of New York Working Men, including Skidmore, Leggett, and John

Commerford, who were consistent opponents of chattel slavery and advocates of equal rights for

African Americans, enslaved or free. Throughout the 1830s, in the columns of the Advocate and another workingmen’s paper, the Man, Evans railed against the slave trade; compared the arguments made against emancipation to those made in favor of perpetuating the banking system; lamented the baneful effects of slavery on the agriculture and population of the South; opposed colonization as a scheme to perpetuate, rather than abolish, slavery; printed notices of antislavery meetings; and defended immediate abolitionists’ right to free speech, if not always their approach to ending slavery.59 “We believe it is our duty to take the part of the oppressed, against the oppressor, whatever may be the kindred or country of the oppressor and the oppressed,” the Advocate declared. “In relation to the question of slavery our kindred are mankind—our color is the color of freedom.”60

Perhaps the most striking indication of Evans’ commitment to antislavery came in

August, 1831. That month, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher who claimed to be guided by religious visions, led a group of perhaps one hundred fellow slaves in a bloody massacre of local

58 Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 197-201; 240; Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 29-30. 59 “The Slave Trade,” Man, May 27, 1834; “A Parallel,” Man, June 6, 1834; “Effects of Slavery,” Working Man’s Advocate, October 24, 1835; “Slavery,” Man, June 9, 1834; “Anti Slavery Society,” Working Man’s Advocate, October 10, 135; “The Abolitionists,” Man, July 19, 1835. Even after he settled on land reform as the solution to “all slavery,” Evans was never specific about how he would have preferred to see chattel slavery abolished. In general, and like most antislavery white northerners, he seemed to favor some form of gradual emancipation over the “immediatism” of the Garrisonians. He remained suspicious of, and to some degree, hostile towards the Garrisonians, even as he admired their integrity and defended their right to free speech: “We believe that many of the advocates of the IMMEDIATE ABOLITION of slavery are actuated by a fanatical enthusiasm, and are not the advocates of LIBERTY for its own sake,” Evans wrote in 1835. “But they are honest in their principles and the measures they propose are just”—which was more than he could say about the proponents of colonization. Man, June 9, 1834. 60 Working Man’s Advocate, October 15, 1831.

116 whites in the area around Southampton, Virginia. The incident, which resulted in the deaths of some sixty whites and caused widespread panic throughout the South, became known as the Nat

Turner Rebellion. Astonishingly—and perhaps alone among northern newspapers, including

Garrison’s Liberator—the Working Man’s Advocate defended the enslaved insurrectionaries’ motives, if not their methods. Moreover, Evans laid the blame for the massacre squarely at the feet of southern slaveholders, who, he alleged, had failed to take the necessary steps to abolish slavery and kept enslaved people in a state of ignorance and oppression. To Evans, the events in

Southampton proved that slavery operated to the detriment of both whites and blacks, although he was quick to point out that, while “FIFTY-EIGHT HUMAN BEINGS with white skins” had met their deaths in the massacre, “ONE HUNDRED or more with dark skins” had been put to death “for crimes of which most of them were entirely innocent.” Evans viewed the rebellion in terms of natural rights theory and a Jeffersonian “right to revolution”; “however absurd or cruel” the Turner rebels had been, Evans wrote, “if their object was to obtain their freedom... their cause was just.”61 His defense of the rebellion earned Evans the enmity of Jacksonian editor Duff

Green, who referred to him in the Washington Telegraph as a “miscreant... dangerous to society,

[who] deserves to be treated as an incendiary or an outlaw.” But Evans remained defiant, refusing to retract a word of his original statement and turning the charge of “fanatic” against proslavery Democrats like Green. In a moment of reflection, Evans castigated the labor movement that he had done so much to bring about as having been “negligent” in advancing the cause of enslaved blacks. Labor reformers, Evans admitted, “might... have done more for the cause of emancipation than we have done”:

61 William Lloyd Garrison, by contrast, found himself compelled to condemn the uprising as inconsistent with his principles of nonviolence and perfectionist Christianity. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 30-32.

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Our only excuse is, that the class to which we belong, and whose rights we endeavor to advocate, are threatened with evils only inferior to those of slavery, which evils it has been our principal object and endeavor to eradicate. We might, however, have done more for the cause of emancipation than we have done, and we are now convinced that our interest demands that we should do more, for EQUAL RIGHTS can never be enjoyed, even by those who are free, in a nation which contains slaveites enough to hold in bondage two millions of human beings.62

Compared to Evans, William Leggett would take longer to arrive at his conversion to abolitionism. But once there, he soon made good on his oft-quoted promise, later emblazoned on the title page of Fitzwilliam Byrdsall’s History of the Equal Rights, or Loco-Foco Party, to

“convince me that a principle is right in the abstract, and I will reduce it to practice, if I can.” A former Navy midshipman and literary critic, Leggett had few workingmen’s credentials when he joined ’s Evening Post in 1829. But he soon came to embody the “ultra” democratic principles—uncompromising support for free trade and “equal rights,” meaning opposition to any form of monopoly or special privilege—that found a new vehicle in the Loco

Foco movement of the mid-1830s. Leggett assumed editorial control of the Evening Post only weeks before the July riots in 1834. Beginning with an editorial denouncing the “Riot at the

Chatham-Street Chapel,” Leggett slowly gravitated towards out-and-out support for abolition. In

1835, the specter of antislavery mob violence, this time in Haverhill, Massachusetts, again prompted Leggett to reconsider his antislavery and willingness to concede to proslavery southern Democrats. Having railed against the “money power” in the form of banks and paper currency, he now turned against the “monster slavery,” reading and, to the shock of many of his followers, giving his wholehearted endorsement of the platform of the American

Antislavery Society. By 1837, after nearly two years of mulling over the question of slavery in a

62 “Negro Slavery,” Working Man’s Advocate, October 1st, 1831.

118 series of increasingly-pointed essays, Leggett was ready to declare himself an abolitionist. In fact, Leggett went further than many who called themselves abolitionists, advocating political and civil rights (including the suffrage) for freed blacks. Characteristically, he framed his newfound abolitionism as the logical extension of a strict construction of the Constitution and

Democratic equal rights doctrine.63

Unbeknownst to themselves, working-class reformers like Evans and Leggett were developing what would eventually become known as the “freedom national” interpretation of the

Constitution. Indeed, in some cases they were doing so well before the so-called “political abolitionists,” men like James G. Birney, Salmon Chase, and Gamaliel Bailey, began to articulate similar ideas. In an 1831 debate with the same Courier and Enquirer whose editorials would fan the flames of the Abolition Riots a few years later, Evans developed some of the arguments that would later be adopted by the Liberty Party and other political abolitionists. The

Founders had purposely omitted the word “slave” from the document, Evans pointed out.

Although the three-fifths and fugitive slave clauses recognized the existence of slavery, nowhere did the Constitutions offer specific protections for slave property or define a “right” to property in human beings. “The idea is too absurd for belief,” Evans maintained, “that the framers intended even to recognize the right of the minority of the people of any state to hold the majority as property, and it is monstrously absurd to suppose that it was intended to guarantee the right to such property.” Although he elsewhere acknowledged, in common with the then- prevailing interpretation of the Constitution, that the federal government could not abolish slavery without a constitutional amendment, only the most extreme proslavery ideologues— those who espoused what Evans labeled “this new and abominable Tory-Whig doctrine”—

63 New York Evening Post , 8 July 1834, 3, 4 Sept 1835; Leggett, Political Writings, Vol. II, 50–55; Plaindealer, 14 January, 11, 25 February, 29 July, 3, 24 December, 1837; Political Writings, Vol. II, 327–30.

119 denied that the states lacked the right to do so within their own borders. Even remaining within the parameters of states’ rights, slavery could still be abolished “by means of the general government, or by the general government withholding the means of perpetuating it.” One way it could do so would be by abolishing slavery in the areas where the federal government had jurisdiction, such as in Washington, D.C.—or, as Evans’ later advocacy of land reform would soon him to insist, in the public lands.64

Leggett agreed that the Founders’ omission of the word “slave” from the Constitution implied that they did not intend it to offer permanent protections to slavery, and believed that abolition in Washington, D.C. was not only possible, but desirable. In response to the proslavery

Constitutional theory of John Calhoun, he made the argument, based on due process, that

“nowhere” did the Constitution “countenance the idea that slaves are considered property in the meaning of the term as used” in the Fifth Amendment. To free enslaved people would not be to take them for any “use,” let alone a public one, but merely because it complied with a “sense of the inalienable rights of humanity.” Leggett’s “divorce” of slavery from the constitutional right to property would go on to form a key component of the Liberty Party platform and other political abolitionists whose antislavery strategy was based on the “divorce” of the Federal

Government from all support or sanction for slavery.65

For his trouble—for his embrace of abolition—Leggett was effectively read out of the

Democratic Party of New York, and thereby deprived of the patronage on which the Evening

Post depended. Commenting on Leggett’s expulsion, the Washington Globe, the national party’s semiofficial party organ, noted that “the spirit of Agrarianism was perceivable in all the political

64 Working Man’s Advocate, October 1, 1831; October 15, 1831; Man, June 9th, 1834. I am indebted to Jonathan Earle for bringing Evans’ antislavery interpretation of the Constitution to my attention. See Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 33-35. 65 Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 23–24.

120 views of the Editor... this might possibly be set down to individual caprice... But he has at last, and we are glad of it, taken a stand which must forever separate him from the Democratic Party.

His journal now openly and systematically encourages the Abolitionists.” Despite his official excommunication, Leggett remained a hero to the radical and pro-labor element of the

Democratic Party, which had found a new if temporary home with the formation of the Equal

Rights Party (the Locofocos) after the famous candle-lit meeting at Tammany Hall in October

1835. The Globe was far from the only paper to equate Locofoco radicalism with agrarianism and abolitionism. The conservative New York Times lumped together “Agrarians...Working

Men’s faction...Fanny Wright Men... [and] Infidels,” while the Sunday Morning News assured its readers that “every one knows that [abolitionism] was one of the original doctrines of the Fanny

Wright, no-monopoly, no-property, and no-marriage party.”66

Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, author of a history of the Locofocos, later opined that Leggett’s

“agrarianism” had once been far more dangerous and threatening to the party establishment than his abolitionism. But, as Byrdsall noted with approval, by the early 1840s Leggett’s “agrarian spirit of anti-monopoly” had become Party doctrine. The same could not be said for antislavery.

In 1838, after a pair of conservative pro-bank Democrats “bolted” the party in support of Whig candidate William Seward and actor Edwin Forrest declined the nomination for a seat in

Congress, former Locofocos submitted Leggett’s name instead. Despite evidence of widespread support within a newly-reorganized Tammany Hall, party officials forced Leggett to answer a questionnaire on his views on abolition in the District of Columbia. Leggett restated his belief

66 The Washington Globe and New-York Times quoted in Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, The History of the Loco-Foco, or Equal Rights Party, Its Movements, Conventions and Proceedings, with Short Characteristic Sketches of Its Prominent Men (New York: Clement & Packard, 1842), 18–19, 29. See also Liberator on “Jacobinism,” 8 Sept 1837, 3 May 1839.

121 that “Congress has full constitutional power” to abolish slavery in the District, and his nomination was promptly shuttered.67

Leggett would continue to proclaim his abolitionism until his premature death that same year. He would not live to see the resurrection of his antislavery by Salmon P.

Chase and others who readily acknowledged Leggett’s influence when crafting the Free Soil

Party platform in 1848.68 As yet, the analysis of antislavery radicals like Leggett and Evans did not lead most northern labor reformers into a full-throated assault on slavery. But attacks on abolitionists and other violations of free speech, and the South’s increasingly shrill insistence that slavery be defended and expanded, would soon cause even some of the most recalcitrant northern laborites to question their assumptions about the relationship between free and slave labor, and between northern “producers” and slaveowning southern ones. Before the “Slave

Power” could emerge as the successor to the “Money Power” as the leading threat to “equal rights,” however—and before the political realignments brought about by war and slaveholder expansion would lead labor spokesmen and ordinary workers into an unprecedented alliance with antislavery forces—a devastating economic depression would derail the efforts of reformers like

Evans. In the 1840s, the aftermath of the Panic of 1837—caused in part by over-speculation in western land—would cast a long shadow over the remnants of a decimated and divided workingmen’s movement.

67 Byrdsall, History, 20, 32; Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 25–26. 68 Leggett to Jr., 24 October 1838, in Leggett, Political Writings, 2: 335–36; Julius Rubens Ames and Benjamin Lundy, The Legion of Liberty!: And Force of Truth, Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds of Some Apostles, Champions and Martyrs, (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1842), 64; Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 161–62.

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CHAPTER Four “Our Refuge is Upon the Soil”: The National Reform Association and the Antislavery Crucible of Land Reform

On a winter Sunday in February, 1844, a small group of workingmen reformers met in the back room of John Windt’s printing shop on Thompson Street in New York City. The six men—Windt, along with Thomas Ainge Devyr, James A. Pyne, James Marshall, and Lewis

Masquerier—had been called together by George Henry Evans, editor of the Working Man’s

Advocate and veteran of the Working Men’s movement of the previous decade, would go on to form the nucleus of the National Reform Association, the land reform that would launch one of the most significant working-class movements of the pre-Civil War era.1 Evans had recently returned to New York from Granville, New Jersey, where he had gone into semi-reclusion, tending a small farm with his family and quietly mulling over ideas about land and labor. That day, Evans and his compatriots organized what was at first called the “National Reform Union” or “Agrarian League,” and soon rechristened the National Reform Association, to spread their program of working-class land reform. From Windt’s print shop, Evans’ land reform ideas would slowly be disseminated through labor organizations, labor newspapers, and workingmen’s circles until they made their way into the mind of the general public and into the legislation and party

1 “Workingmen’s Meeting,” Working Man’s Advocate, 18 March, 1844; Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2005), 9, 16-17; Helene Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 36-37; Lewis Masquerier, Sociology, 95; Thomas Ainge Devyr, The Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century, Part II, 39-41. A different account of the origin of the National Reform Association is given by Thomas Devyr, who claimed the “National Reform Party” had been formed in his printing office, and mentions only Evans and Windt as being present. See Thomas Ainge Devyr, The Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century Vol. II, 39.

123 platforms of their day, eventually forming part of the basis for the most significant political realignment of the period.2

As one of the prime movers in the Working Men’s Party, Evans had been central to the group of workingman labor reformers who had begun to construct an ideological edifice on a foundation of republican producerism, the labor theory of value, agrarian theories of property rights, and the notion of an inherent conflict between capital and labor in the 1820s and 30s.

Although several of the six men who gathered in Windt’s office that day had backgrounds that trouble any easy retrospective distinction between working-class labor activism and middle-class reform, all were skilled workers. Evans, Windt, Devyr, and Masquerier had all been trained as printers—an occupation then in the vanguard of industrial change, and which by the 1830s had already become significantly mechanized and subject to a strict division of production based on wage labor.3 Windt had been the president of the city’s first printer’s union, a position he left to start his own print shop. Devyr, an Irish immigrant active in the upstate anti-rent movement, was a veteran of the causes of both Irish nationalism and English Chartism who had fled England to escape imprisonment for his political activism. Masquerier, a Kentuckian, had earlier been a follower of Robert Owen; he would soon become one of the leading theorists of the National

Reformers and of an idiosyncratic brand of working-class “sociology,” as well as a dedicated abolitionist. James Marshall may have been a shoemaker, while James A. Pyne, another English immigrant, appears to have toiled in a number of unskilled and moderately-skilled trades,

2 Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2005), 9, 16-17; Helene Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 36-37; Lewis Masquerier, Sociology, 95; Thomas Ainge Devyr, The Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century, or “Chivalry” in Modern Days... American Section, (Greenpoint, NY: 1882), 39-41. A different account of the origin of the National Reform Association is given by Devyr, who claimed the “National Reform Party” had been formed in his printing office, and mentions only Evans and Windt as being present. See Devyr, Odd Book, American Section, 39. *See/find “Workingmen’s meeting,” WMA, March 18, 1844. 3 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788—1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 129-32; other sources on printing?

124 including picture-framing. Of the five men present who had been resident in New York during the 1830s, all save Masquerier had been active in the trades union and Loco Foco movements.4

Within a few weeks, the new organization had held more than twenty public meetings; launched a newspaper, the People’s Rights, edited by Evans and Windt; and began to hold weekly meetings on Thursday nights in their headquarters in Evans’ office on Chatham and

Mulberry Streets. By the spring of 1844, the National Reform Association had moved the site of their meetings to Croton Hall, a “temperance hotel” at the corner of Bowery and Division, and drafted a frame of government. The National Reform Constitution, ratified that spring and published in the Working Man’s Advocate, outlined the structure of the new organization and the means of accomplishing its goals. A Central Committee would be elected annually, consisting of one delegate representing each ward in Manhattan and , as well as one each from the towns of Williamsburgh and Jersey City. Auxiliary or affiliated Associations, the group hoped, would soon be formed “in every part of the Union.” Members would be required to sign a

Pledge, vowing not to vote for any candidate for any legislative office who would not in turn pledge himself “to use all the influence of his station... to prevent all further traffic in the Public

Lands.” Members would also pay dues of two cents a month, in addition to a one-time twenty- five cent membership fee; non-voting sympathizers were encouraged to sign the Pledge and could attend all lectures and public meetings.5

4 Lause, Young America, 17; Ray Boston, British Chartists in America (Rowan and Littlefield, 1971), Appendix, 94; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 41. Occupations for Marshall and Pyne are based on searches in Doggett’s New-York City Directory, 1845-1849, as the above. 5 Working Man’s Advocate, “National Reform Association. Constitution.” April 4, 1844, p. 1. See also “Agrarian Pledge,” in Principles and Objects of the National Reform Association, or Agrarian League (New York: 1845), 10. For an early example of a petition drafted by Evans that combines land reform with the slavery issue, see “Important Movement in New York: To the Congress of the United States,” Radical I, Vol. 6 (June, 1841), 1. The short-lived People’s Rights would soon be supplanted by Young America, a new paper edited by Evans and dedicated to the cause of land reform, as well as a revived Working Man’s Advocate.

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At one of its early “public meetings of workingmen,” held on March 18th, the still- embryonic group appointed a commission “to inquire into the causes which produce in this

Republic a depression of labor, and the social degradation of the laborer.” The fruit of that commission’s inquiry, issued in pamphlet form addressed “To the People of the United States,” would serve as a sort of manifesto of National Reform. Twenty thousand copies of the pamphlet were printed and distributed to New York workingmen, and its “Report” was reprinted a few months later in a revivified Working Man’s Advocate. The “Report” identified the problem: the oversupply of labor in the cities, a condition that was so apparent to any observer that the report’s committee felt it unnecessary “to enter into statistical details in order to prove a fact that is not disputed by anybody.” The committee expressed the problem in the basic terminology of classical political economy: the supply and demand of labor was regulated by “”; and while an increase in the consumption of manufactured goods was increasing the demand for labor in the cities, supply-side factors far offset this equilibrium. Chief among these were the increase in population—on the cusp of a further exponential increase by waves of Irish and

German immigrants—and the advent of mechanization and the division of labor in many trades.

Far from being the salvation of labor, the National Reformers held, the new technology had “not merely lessen[ed], but almost annihilate[d] the demand” by “withering up all human competition,” resulting in the “ultimate prostration of human labor.”6 Although the authors of the

“Report” had no way of knowing it, the wealthiest 4 per cent of New Yorkers had dramatically increased their share of the city’s wealth over the past decade and a half, from 63 to 80 per cent

6 “To the People of the United States: Report,” Working Man’s Advocate, July 6, 1844. The “Report” singled out cotton and textile spinning, iron manufacturing, shoe-, boot-, and hat-making, carpentry and sawyering, grain milling and baking, bricklaying, bookbinding, and river and maritime occupations as trades especially impacted by mechanization. On the other hand, the committee looked forward to the day, not far distant, when “the Steam Engine will be applied successfully to the cultivation of the soil,” in which case mechanization might well alleviate the farmer’s toil—but only if his right to the soil had been previously secured. In a footnote, the authors claimed that “thirty years ago,” in 1814, the total number of “paupers” in the United States had stood at 29,166, “or 1 in 300,” whereas in 1844 there were 51,600 such destitute citizens in New York alone, or one in seven of the population of that city.

126 by the year after the NRA’s founding. The Associationist organ, the Harbinger, soon to become both a sounding-board and an ally of the National Reformers, estimated that, of the city’s

400,000 residents, 300,000 lived on a dollar or less per week.7

The solution the committee proposed for this state of affairs was a disarmingly simple one: the surplus labor force would should be dispersed onto the public lands, which, as the

National Reformers argued, “belong to the People... held by the Government in trust for them.”

The public lands should be regarded as a “Capital Stock, which belongs, not to us only, but to posterity”; the committee denied the right of Congress to sell them off to speculators or other non-producers. Workingmen, therefore, needed only “to assert and establish the right of the people to the soil.” The NRA constitution, adopted soon afterwards, stated the land reformers’ basic demand: “that the Public Lands of the States and of the United States shall be made free to actual settlers, and to actual settlers only.” The right to the land thus secured, “an outlet [would] be formed that will carry off our superabundant labor to the salubrious and fertile West,” thereby elevating thousands of urban wage workers from poverty to “a certain and a speedy independence,” while simultaneously reducing wasteful competition in the market for labor and alleviating the downward pressure on wages for those who remained in the cities. The “proper equilibrium between agricultural and mechanical labor” would thus be restored, and “no longer would “men, women, and children, be crowded together in cities, dependent on the chances of labor for the evening’s meal... or cooped up in factories, toiling monotonously, and inhaling the seeds of disease, from twelve to fourteen hours a day, for a bare subsistence.” Quoting Andrew

Jackson as well as the recent congressional Report of the Committee on Public Lands, which recommended selling off the public lands at low prices in order to spur the growth in the number

7 Pessen, Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War, 35; Harbinger I, no. 8 (2 August 1845). According to the Harbinger, one-third of the city’s labor force worked in manufacturing by 1845, a number far in advance of the national average but indicative of coming industrial change.

127 of “freeholders,” the document declared that “OUR REFUGE IS UPON THE SOIL... our heritage is on the Public Domain.”8

It was the ultimate statement of the “safety valve” theory of westward expansion, in which the prospect of vast stretches of unsettled land beckoned irresistibly as a solution to the congested bottleneck of human labor that troubled the overcrowded cities of the northeast, particularly in the economic environment of unemployment and stagnation that characterized the first half of the 1840s. For workers buffeted by the aftershocks of the Panic of 1837—caused in part by the collapse of a financial bubble created by overinvestment and speculation in land and slaves—land reform held a powerful appeal. In the imaginations of land reformers, these were

“boundless territories of unsettled, almost unexplored”—and, the reformers seemed to have assumed, unpeopled—tracts of land, uncultivated and ripe for settlement and habitation by virtuous free labor. In reality, despite their imagined “boundlessness,” the public lands were sold off at a rapid rate, thanks to expansion on the slave-grown cotton frontier; between 1828 and

1836, some 48 million acres of public land had been sold, and by the latter year, public land sales amounted to as much as $5 million a month. Although an 1820 act had lowered the price of public lands to a minimum of $1.25 an acre, in keeping with the National Republicans’ policy of using public lands as a source of revenue, the price of a farm of 160 acres—thought to be the amount needed for a self-sustaining farm by a wide variety of sources in the period—still represented nearly a years’ wages for a well-paid Massachusetts farm laborer or unskilled worker in New York, more than two years’ for a textile mill worker at Lowell. The rampant speculation

8 “To the People of the United States: Report,” Working Man’s Advocate, July 6, 1844; “White Slavery,” Radical I, Vol. 3 (March, 1841), 1.

128 indulged in by eastern capitalists and southern slaveholders in the period put access to the public lands even further out of reach.9

As simple as it may appear in hindsight, the National Reformers’ solution made ample sense to a generation of reformers steeped in republican and agrarian notions about the connections between landed property and independence. Land reform was a solution that presented itself readily to the minds of a generation imbued with the limited-government philosophy of Jefferson and Jackson and the reigning doctrines of laissez-faire political economy. Even as they attacked the notion of an absolute right to property in land and construction of a “workingman’s” political economy in conscious opposition to the dominant wisdom of , working-class land reformers largely accepted as a foregone conclusion the assumption that wages and other conditions affecting workers were regulated by

“natural laws which... render it difficult, if not altogether impossible, to permanently improve the condition of the working people.” But if government could not be invoked to abolish the wage system or intervene directly in the relationship between employer and employed, it could still be called upon to realize the democratic promise of the Revolution by signaling its recognition of what land reformers described a “natural right” to the soil, a right which they held superseded any pretensions to private ownership of the public domain. In this respect at least, the working- class land reform movement of the 1840s and 50s had much in common with abolitionists, who similarly argued for the eradication of property rights in human beings—and were similarly attacked as fanatics who threatened to undermine the sacred right to property claimed by slaveholders, landowners, and other capitalists. But unlike the Garrisonians of the American

9 Joshua Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 270–74; “Table I.—Wage rates of labor of men on farms in Massachusetts, 1752–1860,” in Bulletin of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Statistics, No. 88–103 (Washington, D.C.: General Printing Office, 1904–1913), 9; Stanley Lebergott, “Wage Trends, 1800–1900,” in Trends in the American Economy of the Nineteenth Century ( Press, 1960), 464, 483.

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Anti-Slavery Society, the land reformers’ project, as they conceived it, was inherently political.

As one oversimplified but effective National Reform broadside had it, by seizing control of the democratic machinery, the workingman would simply “Vote Yourself a Farm.” Over the next half-decade, this phrase and others like it would give rise to the most significant self-consciously working-class political movement the nation had seen since the Working Men’s parties of the late 1820s.10

In the weeks and months after their initial meeting, the National Reformers would build on the program of land reform that Evans had begun to develop while in self-imposed exile in

New Jersey, culminating in a three-point program that they disseminated to the public in a relentless propaganda campaign carried out in newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and outdoor public meetings. First, the public lands should be given away free by the government to “actual settlers” rather than speculators. Second, as a distinct species of non-property, “the common inheritance of all mankind,” the lands must be held as inalienable. The seizure of homesteads for debts would be abolished; settlers might sell any “improvements” they had made, but the land itself could not be sold or rented. And third, the maximum quantity of land that any one individual might own would be limited by law.11

It was this third and, to Evans and other land reform leaders, all-important plank that contained what on examination reveals itself as the truly radical nature of the National

Reformers’ outwardly straightforward program.12 If the first measure would secure the individual

10 Working Man’s Advocate, July 6, 1844. On the role of supply and demand in regulating wages, see also Radical I, p. 6, 36, 41, 85. 11 Ibid., p. 4, 9. Evans had laid out these basic planks of National Reform, along with a theoretical basis for the abolition of property in land, justified in the language of natural rights, as early as January, 1841. See “To the Working Men of the United States,” Radical I, Vol. 1 (January, 1841), 12 The importance of land limitation to Evans and other National Reformers is suggested by their continued efforts to press for it in resolutions and in conventions throughout the 1840s and 50s, although they ultimately failed to persuade Republicans to adopt the principle of limitation into the Homestead Act. See, for example, the activities of National Reformers in the first Industrial Congress, New-York Tribune, October 15, 1845; in the New York Constitutional Convention of 1848, Tribune, 130 the right to access of the soil, and the second ensure that the right to this access was inalienable, the third would make manifest the actuating principle that lay behind the anti-monopoly, anti- bank platform of the Equal Rights party; behind the Working Men’s emphasis on education and the ownership of productive property; and behind the famous phrase in Jefferson’s Declaration: the promise of equality. When combined with republican notions of dependence and independence, the land reform movement’s agrarian reformulation of the labor theory of value held a broad appeal to a wide spectrum of urban workers, who suffered from a sustained decline in wages and a rising price of living throughout the 1840s, despite the general prosperity of the northern economy. It also offered critics of the emerging relations of employment under industrial capitalism, with their concentrations of landed and productive property, a potent explanatory and ideological weapon.13

The full implications of the strain of labor antislavery that Evans and a handful of others had helped to develop in the 1830s would have to await the emergence of a political antislavery movement that would combine constitutional arguments about slavery with an appeal to self- interest that many northerners would find irresistible. But in the meantime, Evans and his workingmen followers in the land reform movement would contribute much towards the construction and popularization of the element that would prove to hold the key to antislavery’s

April 24, 1846; and the Liberty League convention at Canastota, New York, Tribune, November 30, 1848. See also the recommendations in favor of limitation made by the select committee on public lands in the New York State Assembly, which included National Reform sympathizers and at least one “mechanic,” in 1847 and 1851; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 92–93; NY Ass Doc, 1847; Vol VII, No 302, pp. 4-5, 6-7. On the success of land limitation measures in Wisconsin, see J. G. Gregory, “Land Limitation in Wisconsin,” ?? 13 “The New Party,” Mechanic’s Advocate, January 28, 1847; “Land Limitation, & c.,” The Subterranean, April 24, 1847; “To the Working Men of the United States,” Radical I, Vol. 1 (January, 1841), p.1; Principles and Objects of the National Reform Association, 2–3. For other examples of the appeal that the principle of land limitation held for labor reformers, and the ways in which they connected it to natural rights theory and Jeffersonian egalitarianism, see “To Workingmen—Land Limitation. Robert M. Fogel, who describes the entire period of 1840—1858 as one of “hard times” for nonfarm manual workers, broken only by three brief interludes of relative prosperity, has estimated that the average decline in wages for urban workers between 1848 and 1855 was “probably in the range of 25 to 50 percent.” Robert M. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 354-59.

131 appeal for white northerners—what Evans and the National Reformers referred to as “Free

Soil”—as well as towards the elaboration of a theory of property rights that would both challenge and bolster the abolitionists’ attack on “property in man.”14

The Ideology of National Reform and the Reconceptualization of Property Rights

On the mastheads of his newspapers and in NRA pamphlets, Evans evoked authorities from Moses to Mackenzie; Black Hawk to Blackstone; Jefferson, Jackson, Carlyle, and

Cobbett—all of whom, National Reformers claimed, had written in support of a natural right to the land.15 Perhaps no authority was cited by the Evan and his fellow National Reformers more frequently than Thomas Jefferson, whose pronouncements on equality and the right to the land they quoted widely, and whose portrait and signature, atop the famous quote from the

Declaration’s preamble, adorned a full page of one National Reform pamphlet.16 But although the National Reformers’ brand of agrarianism shared much in common with that of Paine and

Jefferson, the National Reform vision of workingmen’s return to the soil had little in common with the atomized individualism or squatters’ sovereignty of frontier legend. Rather, it was marked by the kind of hyper-rationalism more often associated with Robert Owen’s planned communities or Fourier’s fantastic utopian schemes. Extending Jefferson’s land survey to impose a vast, geometrically precise grid onto the as-yet-uncharted topography of the West, the National

Reform plan would carve the wilderness into “rural republican townships” of six miles square, divided into individual farms of 160 acres each, with a square mile in the center comprising a

14 Although Mark Lause has claimed that the term “free soil” emerged out of a state convention in Albany in October 1846, in which Liberty Party candidates were questioned by National Reformers, the NRA’s recorded use of the term dates to at least June, 1845. See, for example, “A Free Soil—Progress of the Cause,” Young America, June 28, 1845; Lause, Young America, 77. 15 Principles and Objects of the National Reform Association, (New York, 1845), page # 16 National Reform Almanac for 1848 (New York: 1848),

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“rural city,” and containing “a Park, Public Edifices & Lots for Persons not engaged in

Agriculture.” Eight “principal streets” would radiate out from the park, ultimately connecting them with other townships, “so that the state and county seats of government could be reached by the nearest possible routes.” The streets would be six rods (thirty-nine feet) wide, enough to accommodate a railroad line as well as pedestrian and animal-driven traffic. Cross-streets running at right angles would bend at narrow alleys, forming a sixteen-sided area subdivided into lots of increasing size from two to ten acres. The township plan, National Reformers claimed, could provide for 140 families of farmers, as well as sixty or more engaged in other occupations, for a total of 200 families, or about a thousand individuals. Given the unknown and possibly unlimited potential to improve the land, as well as “the advantages of co-operation,” the

Reformers speculated that a single township might eventually be able to support four or even eight thousand people, with “families to the third and fourth generation voluntarily remaining on the homestead.”17

Land reform was thus conceived as the solution not only to the oversupply of labor in the congested cities, but to the expropriation of surplus value from the laborer under the system of wage labor. As one National Reformer in Cincinnati wrote, “When the working classes become owners of homesteads, they will be in a position to regulate, not only the hours of labor, but also the wages, much more satisfactorily to all parties concerned than could be effected by any coercive law whatever.” “If the whole people had free access to the land,” Evans wrote, the laborer would “receive the full value of his labor, because he would have the ready alternative of laboring for himself.”18 If it would not abolish the wage system entirely, land reform would free

17 Principles and Objects, 3-4. The primary architect of National Reform’s urban agrarian town planning was Lewis Masquerier, a transplanted Kentuckian and follower of Owen who had landed in New York City. 18 National Reform Association of Cincinnati, The Friend of Man; Being the Principles of National or Land Reform: Clearly Stated, Together With Answers to the Various Objections That Have Been Urged Against It (William McDiarmid, 133 those laborers who settled on the public lands from dependence on employers and on the competitive market for wages. The resulting relief on the pressure caused by over-competition would then place those who remained in cities in a superior position to bargain for better wages and conditions.

The most important influences to shape Evans’ evolving agarianism were those circulating within the radical workingmen’s milieu with which he had long been associated.

Although he claimed not to have encountered Paine’s Agrarian Justice until the early 1840s,

Evans clearly saw himself in the tradition of the author of Common Sense; he had published several editions of Paine’s works during the 1830s, and had been a participant in the annual celebrations of Paine’s birthday held by New York workingmen.19 But Evans also acknowledged the influence of such diverse authorities as Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, John Gray, and

Thomas Spence (whose 1796 pamphlet, “The Meridian Sun of Liberty,” Evans had reprinted).

The expatriate Evans claim to have encountered all of these thinkers in an English “Social paper,” the Working Bee, in the early 1840s, and indeed transatlantic influences continued to have an impact on the land and labor movements throughout the decade. As the work of historian

Jamie Bronstein has firmly established, both radical ideas growing out of the Chartist movement in Britain and physically transplanted Chartists themselves played a significant role in the working-class movements of the United States in the 1830s and 40s, and the National

Reformers’ land scheme was of a piece with similar working-class plans across the Atlantic,

Cincinnati, OH, 1850), 7; “Equal Right to the Land I,” Working Man’s Advocate, March 16, 1844. The NRA supported the ten- hours movement, a mainstay of labor reform throughout the 1840s and 50s, but insisted that laws regulating the hours of labor were meaningless without corresponding laws preventing employers from manipulating wages at will. 19 “Man’s Inalienable Right to Land,” Radical I, Vol. 4 (April, 1841), 1. Evans also credited Fourier, St. Simon, John Gray, and Moses Jacques as being among the forerunners of his land reform ideas. For the influence of Paine on Evans and New York City workingmen generally, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 70-74; 153-55; 224-25. Evans’ National Reform partner, John Windt, had been among the organizers of Paine birthday celebrations. On Spence, see the Radical ,July 1841; WMA March 16, 1844; June 8, 1844. Norman Ware and some other early biographers claimed that Evans’ father had been “a disciple of Thomas Spence” in England, but no evidence for this assertion can be found. See Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 181.

134 such as those of Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist Co-Operative Land Company and William Evans’

Potters’ Joint-Stock Emigration Society.20

Somewhat more surprisingly, given their former antagonism as leaders of rival factions of the Working Men in the 1820s and early 30s, the ghost of Thomas Skidmore now resurfaced as a major influence on National Reform ideology. Despite what Evans recalled as their

“frequent arguments” in the 1820s, he now professed to believe that Skidmore had been “grossly misrepresented” by the press during his life. In particular, Skidmore’s The Right of Man to

Property! contained “more truths than any ten books which have since been published.” By the early 1840s, Evans had adopted both Skidmore’s notion of a “natural right” to property in land and his identification of land ownership as the “original sin” of American democracy, although he continued to reject the latter’s call for a “general division” of property. Property in land was

“the great error,” stemming from “the most remote periods of time,” when lands previously held in common had been illegitimately enclosed and divided for the purposes of cultivation. “If, on the first settlement of this country, the natural rights of man had been recognized,” Evans suggested, “every man at this day might have been a land holder.” The current maldistribution of land was the result of an illegitimate accumulation of land by a fortunate few at the time of the original settlement, while the subsequent inauguration of an iniquitous “traffic in the soil” comprised “the root of the evil, the cause of that vast inequality of condition now existing among us.” Instead of the “general division” advocated by Skidmore and Spence, however, Evans

20 Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1999). Bronstein has covered the connections between British Chartists and land and labor reformers in the United States so well that there seems little need to reiterate those connections here. Evans’ early biographers, noting the similarity between Evan’s ideas and those of Spence, once claimed that Evans and his father had been followers of Spence in England. Several of Evans’ early chroniclers made this assertion based on a coincidence of names; however, subsequent research has disproven the connection. See Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 151; Jeffrey Newman, “Social Origins of George Henry Evans,” 151. For an early exposition of Evans’ agrarian thought, see “Man’s Inalienable Right to Land,” Radical I, Vol. 4 (April, 1841), 1. For a list of works published by Evans, including those of Paine, see “Works, Published and For Sale Wholesale and Retail, by George H. Evans,” Radical I, December 31, 1841; Radical I, Vol. 7 (July, 1841).

135 explained that National Reformers “merely propose[d] that those who are now unjustly deprived of their right to cultivate the earth should be allowed to take possession of the lands not yet appropriated as private property.” Fortunately, the United States, unlike England, benefitted not only from the blessings of a republican system of government, but from a vast amount of still- unclaimed territory. But if legislative action was not soon taken, the landless, disfranchised masses, “driven to the last stage of oppression,” would rise to demand the “equal division” that

Skidmore had once prophesied. National Reform was “calculated to prevent such a catastrophe,”

Evans maintained; its approach, he claimed—somewhat implausibly—was “truly conservative.”21

Although they were seldom if ever fully elaborated, National Reformers also developed ideas about the means by which both African Americans and Native Americans might be restored to liberty. Even as they imagined a depopulated West ripe for settlement by white

Americans, and clung to the belief that Native American lands had been “redeemed from the aboriginal tribes by monies paid into the Treasury by the productive classes,” National

Reformers evinced a concern for the plight of Native Americans that was unusual among those associated with “Jacksonian” democracy. Evans placed the words of Jackson’s old adversary,

Black Hawk, on the masthead of the Working Man’s Advocate, and quoted extensively from

William L. Stone’s sympathetic account in The Life and Times of Red Jacket. The People’s

Rights published a letter by a correspondent who recommended adopting a Native American

21 “To the Working Men of the United States,” Radical I, Vol. 1 (January, 1841), 1–2.; “Our Principles,” Working Man’s Advocate, April 6, 1844; “Man’s Inalienable Right to Land,” Radical I, Vol. 4 (April, 1841); John Pickering, The Working Man’s Political Economy, Founded on the Principle of Immutable Justice, and the Inalienable Rights of Man; Designed for the Promotion of National Reform, (Cincinnati: Thomas Varney, 1847), 28-30; “Principles and Objects of the National Reform Association,” (New York, 1845); “Man’s Inalienable Right to Land,” Radical I:4 (April, 1841), 1; “Explanation,” Subterranean, United with the Working Man’s Advocate, I:34 (November 16, 1844), 3; “Our Principles,” Working Man’s Advocate, I:3 (April 6, 1844), 2; Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 41-42. Land reformers frequently quoted the English legal authority William Blackstone on the need to interrogate the sources of the legal right to property in land. The masthead of the Working Man’s Advocate quoted Blackstone that “there is no foundation in nature, or in natural law, why a set of words on parchment should convey the dominion of land.”

136 community on the Apalachicola River in Florida as a model for land reformers, describing it as a perfect balance among human instincts, “combining socialism as well as individualism.” And in the Radical, Evans denounced Cherokee removal and war with the Seminoles, lashing out at the government “for bringing indelible disgrace upon itself by its most iniquitous and merciless treatment of the Indian tribes,” all to “possess itself of their lands... for the benefit of speculators!” Plank Six of the NRA’s petition to Congress several years later also connected the theft of Indian land to speculation, claiming that by abolishing the practice, “the strongest motives to encroachments by Whites on the rights of the Indians would be done away with.” “In our own history,” Evans predicted, “this cruel treatment of the Indians will be classed with the unsurpassed exterminating persecutions of the aborigines of Hispaniola by Columbus and his followers.”22

Evans was pessimistic about the prospects for the immediate abolition of slavery in states like South Carolina, where enslaved people formed a majority of the population and where slaveholding power was deeply entrenched. “But could there not be gradual emancipation?” he insinuated. “If the Public lands were made free, could not either the whites or the blacks emigrate to them? and if the blacks, could not a plan be devised to liberate for that purpose double the number of the annual increase?”23 Unlike the anti-abolitionists, Evans did not depict the project of West Indian emancipation that had begun over a decade earlier as a failure, but rather as both a positive and negative model for abolition in the U.S. In 1845, he wrote that “the scheme of

22 “The Indians,” in the Radical, in Continuation of Working Man’s Advocate, Vol. 1, No. 11 (Nov, 1841), 164; “An Indian Town,” People’s Rights, July 27, 1844; “Memorial to Congress,” in “Principles and Objects of the National Reform Association,” (New York, 1845), 15. 23 “Slavery in Missouri,” Working Man’s Advocate, 13 June 1835. Later, in a letter to abolitionist Gerrit Smith, Evans suggested that his land reform program could complement abolition by setting aside a portion of the public lands for separate, voluntary settlement by emancipated blacks, which presumably would have existed as a separate territory within the bounds of the United States. In response to Smith’s charge that such a plan reflected racial prejudice, Evans claimed that he was motivated only by a realistic acknowledgment that “there is a prejudice against color, which it would take ages to remove”; the plan grew out of concern “for their sakes, and not from any prejudice of my own.” “Rejoinder to Gerrit Smith,” People’s Rights, 24 July 1844.

137 emancipation in the West Indies has shown that the blacks can live and pay rent, and it has shown also that they are capable of improvement.” But he feared that since “the whites retain most of the land,” and since they were importing foreign labor in a bid to lower wages and increase rents, unless “the free land doctrine” were adopted, emancipation would “eventually” regress into a situation akin to slavery, “as must the laboring classes of every country where the land is a subject of traffic.” Elsewhere, Evans used West Indian emancipation to put an ingenious spin on the “superiority of free labor” argument. Citing a statistic from Antigua claiming that, since emancipation, only one-third of the labor was required under free labor as had been employed during slavery, Evans argued that the implementation of the “wages system” in the

South would result in a similar proportion of both black and white workers—say, a third of all workers—being “thrown into the landless labor market.” Except “in cases where they are subject to cruel treatment” (an aspect of chattel slavery that Evans and other labor reformers consistently underestimated), the “substitution” of slavery for free labor without access to the land would not be in the best interest of the enslaved.24

Evans had defended the in the early 1830s, and towards the end of that decade he had looked to Haiti as a potential example of “pure republicanism.” In 1837, he published a translation of President Jean-Pierre Boyer’s “Rural Code,” which originally included free land grants from Haiti’s public domain, along with a series of letters on the political and social conditions in that country. Apparently with an eye towards Haitian colonization, Evans had written to Boyer directly, inquiring about the conditions of workers there and whether the

Haitian president would be “disposed to grant lands to such emigrants near a landing on the

24 “The Memphis Convention—Mr. Calhoun—Democracy of South Carolina—Universal Emancipation,” Young America, Dec. 13, 1845; “Consistency of Reformers,” Young America June 28, 1845. Evans rehashed the argument about free labor in Antigua from an earlier article published in April, 1845, citing the Antigua Observer as the source of the statistic; see Young America, April 26, 1845.

138 coast, where, and how much?” Evans must have been disappointed, however, for Boyer’s secretary, Joseph Balthazar Inginac, informed him that the government had long since ceased distributing grants of free land.25 Evans’ apparent interest in black emigration to Haiti as a solution to slavery is uncharacteristic, for elsewhere he had disavowed colonization. But he did, along with such diverse figures as Frances Wright, Benjamin Lundy, and Thomas Jefferson, envision the establishment of an independent state within the United States as a solution to both the problems of African slavery and Native American dispossession. Such a “Negro State,” carved out of the public lands and settled on the “Agrarian” or “equal rights” plan, would offer the lure of landed independence for free blacks, discourage prejudice against color, and provide an incentive for slaveowners to emancipate their slaves.26

Such plans, of course, never came to pass, although later in the decade Evans would collaborate on a plan to resettle landless free blacks and impoverished urban whites but in the wilds of upstate New York. In the meantime, some of the same counties of upstate New York that were beginning to attract the attention of abolitionist Gerrit Smith as potentially fertile fields for black landed proprietorship would become the battleground on which the National Reform movement’s ideological and political weapons would be tested and arrayed.

National Reform and the Politics of the 1840s

The National Reformers’ first forays into electoral politics exposed some of the faultlines that would continue to divide workers and reformers throughout the era of the Second Party

System. A few National Reformers disparaged any involvement in partisan politics whatsoever;

25 The Rural Code of Haiti, Literally Translated from a Publication by the Government Press; Together with Letters From That Country, Concerning Its Present Condition, By a Southern Planter (Granville, NJ: George Henry Evans, 1837). 26 “Indian State,” Young America, Nov. 15, 1845. For Evans’ earlier opposition to the colonization, see The Man, 9 June 1834.

139 at least one, Walter Van Dusen, disavowed voting entirely and advocated for a “moral suasion” approach to land reform. On the other hand, the New England labor paper the Voice of Industry heralded the arrival of National Reform as “a new party,” which it alternately referred to as “the

National Reform Party,” “the Workingmen’s Party,” or “the Humanitary Party.” Evans, perhaps mindful of the disastrous consequences that factional and party alignments on the Working

Men’s and Equal Rights parties in the 1830s, tried hard to avoid direct alliance with either major party. But the absorption of the majority of former Workies and Loco Focos into the Democratic

Party, attracted by the anti-bank and hard-money policies of Andrew Jackson, had had the side effect of identifying the Democrats as the party of Jacksonian radicalism—an association that lingered in the minds of many reformers and gave a Democratic ring to many of their pronouncements, even as the mainstream of the party showed little intention of paying anything but lip service to its working-class constituency. For now, though, most National Reformers stayed loyal to the Democrats, even though the terms of their pledge proclaimed the group to be officially non-partisan. Meanwhile, National Reformers were forced to confront the fact that none of the candidates of either party running for state office in 1844 had responded to their questionnaire asking candidates to clarify their views on land reform.27

A series of relatively localized events in the mid-1840s, however, would soon bring the group a degree of national attention, if not notoriety. Throughout 1844, the aftermath of the so-

27 Lause, Young America, 42; “The New Party,” Voice of Industry, November 19, 1847; John Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats, 92-99. Ashworth makes the case that the National Reformers in particular were “neo-Jacksonian” in their outlook and that they “retained far more than they rejected” of Democratic ideology. While there is a sense in which Ashworth’s assertion rings true, it ignores the fact that many National Reformers, including Evans, later rejected the Democratic Party entirely. For an older but still influential alternative view, see Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians. Pessen argues that radical workingmen were as far away from mainstream Democrats as they were from the Whig Party. The technique of questioning candidates was utilized in a variety of locations during the second half of the 1840s, at times to less ambiguous effect. After questioning candidates on their land reform views, National Reformers in Lowell, Massachusetts decided to field their own candidate against William Schouler, the candidate of the mill owners, who narrowly won election in 1847. Voice of Industry, November 6, 13, 1846. In Wisconsin, Charles Durkee’s affirmative response to the land reform questionnaire helped launch his career as a Free Soil, later Republican, Congressman from that state. “Interrogation of Candidates,” American Freeman, September 1, 1847.

140 called “Dorr War” in Rhode Island occupied much of the National Reformers’ attention. Thomas

Dorr had won the support of many immigrants and workingmen for his leadership of an armed rebellion that followed a state constitutional crisis in 1841-42. The Dorrites demanded the overthrow of the state’s Royal Charter, granted in 1663 and still in effect, which specified that citizens own at least $134 in landed property to be able to vote—making Rhode Island one of the last states in the nation with a property requirement for suffrage. The movement’s “People’s

Constitution,” ratified by referendum in late 1841, provided universal suffrage for white men but not for Rhode Island’s significant African American population. The People’s Constitution was scrapped in 1843 and replaced with a liberalized state constitution that abolished property requirements and extended the suffrage to blacks, but when Dorr returned to the state later that year, he was arrested and tried for treason. Evans used the editorial pages of the Working Man’s

Advocate to press for Dorr’s release, chairing a meeting which called on “all the friends of FREE

SUFFRAGE” to use all constitutional means to secure his freedom, and blamed his imprisonment on the illegitimate power of Rhode Island’s “landed aristocracy,” conveniently ignoring the discriminatory provisions of the People’s Constitution. denounced the Dorrites and the People’s Constitution in the Tribune, but other abolitionists took a more nuanced view. The Liberator pointed out that the new constitution proposed by the state’s

“Charterists” in opposition to the People’s Constitution had also originally contained the word

“white,” opening the suffrage to African Americans only after what the Liberator described as a cynical ploy for black people’s political loyalties and military service. The “landholders’ party,” the Liberator’s correspondent explained, had been “forced” to accept black voting for the first time in Rhode Island’s history “by the pressure of a fearful emergency.” Their “confidence” thus

“secured,” Providence blacks found that “as by magic! Colored servants were cordially

141 welcomed to the parlors and front windows of their masters... so that one would have thought the whole city had become abolitionists in one night.” But “even now,” despite the passage of the new constitution, the Liberator suggested that there was little reason to believe that blacks would be “admitted to an enjoyment of equal political rights in R.I.”28

Perhaps more consequential, both in terms of the immediate development of National

Reform as a movement and as a bellwether for the shifting winds of politics in New York, was the Anti-Rent movement that gripped the counties of the Hudson Valley and Catskill regions during the 1840s. The anomalous pattern of landholding in the region, a remnant of legal claims dating to the time of the Dutch patroons, concentrated some two millions acres of upstate land in the hands of the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, and a handful of other landlords. Perhaps a twelfth of the state’s population, meanwhile, labored on their lands as tenants. Beginning in

1839, upstate tenants organized a movement to resist the unfair practices stemming from the landlords’ monopoly on land, utilizing rent boycotts, lobbying, legal challenges to landholders’ titles, and, most dramatically, armed bands of men disguised as “Indians” who forcibly prevented or seizure of property for non-payment of rent. The movement was a natural fit for the

National Reformers, who saw an opportunity to put their land reform principles into practice and consolidate a political base for a national land reform movement, while providing the anti-renters with an expanded ideological underpinning for their struggle. Anti-renters, like land reformers,

28 “Meeting of the National Reform Association. Liberation of Gov. Dorr,” People’s Rights, July 27, 1844; Subterranean United with the Working Man’s Advocate, October 12, 1844; December 21, 1844; Liberator, July 22, 1842. The Working Man’s Advocate was briefly published during this period in tandem with the Subterranean, the paper of Mike Walsh, the charismatic radical Democrat who led his Spartan Band to Rhode Island to assist the Dorrites during their short-lived armed uprising. For reasons that are unclear, the collaboration between Evans and Walsh soon ended (see below). The flamboyant Providence carpenter and trade union organizer Seth Luther was a major figure in the uprising, and the rebellion was loudly applauded in New York by ex-Loco Focos including Levi Slamm, Ely Moore, and Alexander Ming, Jr. Luther was imprisoned along with Dorr in the aftermath of the uprising, and later declared insane and confined to an asylum. See Erik J. Chaput, The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2013); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005), 540– 45.

142 insisted that their independence and their “natural right” to the fruits of their labor could only be attained by the redistribution of landed property.29

Perhaps no National Reformer was more zealous in support of the Anti-Rent cause than

Thomas Devyr, who moved to Albany in April 1845 to become the editor of the Albany

Freeholder, the anti-renters’ official organ. Devyr was a veteran rabble-rouser, having supported the anti- and nationalist causes in his native Ireland before joining the Chartist movement in Newcastle, England. There he had published Our Natural Rights, a pamphlet in support of land reform in Ireland. Fleeing England for New York in 1840, Devyr served a stint as an editor for a Democratic newspaper before helping to organize the National Reform

Association in 1844. Reeve Huston, the author of the most thorough recent study of the New

York Anti-Rent movement, concludes that Devyr “revived in a new and more radical form what most anti-renters had quietly dropped: a challenge to prevailing definitions of property as derived from paper title.”30 Like Evans and Pickering, Devyr believed that land could not be viewed as legitimate property but was rather part of the common inheritance of all mankind; for the “Law of Nature and of Nature’s God” imparted to “every man who comes into this world... an equal right to the soil.” Devyr thus invoked Biblical authority as well as the labor theory of value, natural rights law, and the natural laws of supply and demand to make the case for land reform, connections he developed further in a National Reform pamphlet, The Jubilee, A Plan for

Restoring the Land of New-York or (Incidentally) of Any Other State to the People.31

29 Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 200), 113–14, 138–140, 158. 30 Ibid., 138–39. 31 The Jubilee, A Plan for Restoring the Land of New-York or (Incidentally) of Any Other State to the People (New York: Young America, n.d.).31 See also Devyr’s own account of his Anti-rent activities in Thomas Ainge Devyr, The Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century, or “Chivalry” in Modern Times (Greenpoint, NY: Thomas A. Devyr, 1882), 41–50 and passim. Huston notes that Devyr’s new, pro-NRA paper, the Anti-Renter, claimed a circulation of 2,000.

143

In Albany, Devyr led an Anti-rent faction in breaking with its Democratic and Whig allies in favor of a National Reform/Anti-rent electoral alliance. But neither Devyr’s injection of a radical reconsideration of property rights or his attempt to realign the movement with National

Reform were without consequences. Devyr was fired from his position as editor of the

Freeholder by its publisher, conservative Democrat Charles F. Bouton, over the protests of anti- renters who rallied to his defense a convention held in support of him. Devyr promptly moved down the street and opened a new paper, the Anti-Renter, from which to promulgate his land reform views. Meanwhile, National Reformers sent Alvan Bovay on a successful lecture tour of the four most important anti-rent counties. Initially, the efforts of Devyr and Bovay were rewarded with an outpouring of support for National Reform measures, particularly in the anti- rent counties of Albany, Rensselaer, Delaware, and Columbia. Although it remains unclear to what extent Anti-rent farmers embraced the radical agrarianism of the NRA, the land reformers won the backing of some of the most important anti-rent leaders, including Smith Boughton, aka the “Indian” leader “Big Thunder,” and Calvin Pepper, an anti-rent lawyer and abolitionist.

Meanwhile, Albany County anti-renters formed a new, hybrid organization called the National

Reform and Anti-Rent Vanguard Association.32 As one Columbia County anti-renter suggested in a letter to Young America, the goals of the two movements were complementary, and might together have formed the basis for the substitution of wage labor with a system of cooperative exchange, since “your mechanics in the cities might soon get village sites, where they could come among us and manufacture their articles, for which we would exchange our produce.”33

32 Huston, Land and Freedom, 163–66; Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, 131. Huston speculates that conflicts over the nature of landed property may have contributed to a split among the rural middle class anti-rent constituency, and offers statistical data correlating support for National Reform based on property holdings and occupation. See Appendix 15, 16, 17, p. 228. 33 Huston, Land and Freedom, 143. See Young America, 10 May, 21 June, 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Aug, 6 Sept, 13, 14 Sept; 8 Nov 1845; Freeholder 9 July, 6 Aug, 1845; 21 Jan, 25 Feb, 26 Aug, 1846; Anti-Renter 31 Jan, 14, 21 Feb, 6 June 1846

144

But the political backlash was not long in coming. Conservative Whigs and Democrats alike denounced the “agrarianism” of the Anti-renters, but it was to the Democracy— specifically, to the Albany Regency, the political machine that dominated New York state politics, and its mouthpiece the Albany Argus—that the landowning class turned to defend their propertied interests. Much as they would during later struggles over the status of slavery in the territories, a critical mass of Democratic power brokers came to the aid of an entrenched landed aristocracy. To be sure, the conflict made for strange bedfellows, with both James Gordon

Bennett of the New York Herald and Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune defending the

Anti-renters. Typically, Greeley framed the issue in terms of the labor theory of property while attempting to strike a balance between the legal property rights of landholders and the broader principle of a right to the soil. Both upstate poltroons and western speculators effectively denied future generations of settlers access to the land by artificially usurping it for posterity; but rather than a forced redistribution, Greeley averred that “we would so shape the legislation and policy of the country as to discourage the future concentration of land into vast estates or manors and encourage its division into small freeholds.” Perhaps even more surprising was the stance of

Whig Governor William H. Seward. The future Republican and Secretary of State complied with the landholders’ demands to send in state militia to restore order, but appeared sympathetic to the

Anti-rent cause in his annual address, proposing to rewrite the state’s laws in order to make them “more accordant with the principles of republican government.” The Anti-rent movement continued to gain strength, and a legislative committee convened by Seward concluded that the current land tenure system had violated the public welfare, and that the state might use to force the sale of parcels of land to tenants at a fair price.34

34 Greeley and Seward both quoted in Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, 130–31.

145

Although the strange alliance thus forged by the Anti-rent debacle flies in the face of many reigning preconceptions about the era of “Jacksonian democracy,” the Anti-rent alliance would not be the last time that a Democratically-inclined coalition of small farmers and urban workers made common cause with progressive, modernizing nationalists in the decades before the Civil War. As they would in future debates over the issues of land, labor, and slavery, both sides rallied around an expansive conception of the “public welfare” and embraced unprecedented state interventions into the regime of private property to realize the broader social goals that their principles demanded. More concretely, the groundwork laid by National Reform activity in the anti-rent counties would provide one important base of support for a new coalition of urban land reformers, landless farmers, and antislavery activists—one that would soon become known as “Free Soil.”35

Land Reformers and Abolitionists in the “Wage Slavery” Debates of the 1840s

In 1841, Evans had declared to the readers of the Radical,

I will not admit that there is another individual in the United States that is more sincerely desirous of abolishing slavery than myself... I am as much an abolitionist as any man in the land. I think Slavery a disgrace to the republic, black slavery as well as white... the longer abolition is postponed, the greater the danger will be. I should consider myself a disgrace to human nature were I to truckle the southern slaveholder, by asserting that the negro is not a man, as some northern editors have done.36

In this and in many other similar statements, Evans and others in the land reform movement simultaneously revived an older rhetorical tradition of comparing various forms of

35 Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, 130–31; Huston, Land and Freedom, 169-70; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 44–46. On Seward, see Huston, 98–100, 214. [Text of Seward’s address?] I am indebted to Adam Tuchinsky for this interpretation. 36 “White Slavery,” Radical I, Vol. 3 (March 1841), 1.

146 oppression to slavery and set the tone that would frame the relationship between abolitionists and labor activists for much of the next decade. As we have seen, the comparison of various forms of oppression to “slavery” was a common rhetorical trope from at least the Age of Revolution on— and indeed it would continue to inform the vocabulary of reform well after the abolition of chattel slavery. What was new was the urgency with which both sides in the debate began to press their case in the 1840s: labor reformers with an increasing theoretical sophistication about why the “dependence” and “domination” inherent in the wage relationship was akin to slavery, and abolitionists with increasing conviction that the institution of property in human beings was so unacceptable that its destruction must take precedence over all other reforms.

Evans’ quote highlights both the missed possibilities and the very real pitfalls of the

“wage slavery” mode of argument. On the one hand, he asserted the humanity of enslaved

African Americans, underscored his refusal to “truckle” to the southern Slave Power, and expressed an apparently sincere wish to see chattel slavery abolished as soon as possible. Here and elsewhere, Evans appeared to lay the groundwork for possible future collaboration with abolitionists. But by resorting to the language of wage or “white slavery,” with its implication of moral equivalency with chattel slavery, Evans and other labor reformers began the debate on terms that were unacceptable to abolitionists, who increasingly insisted on defining property in human beings as the ne plus ultra of slavery. 37

But labor reformers also challenged abolitionists to re-think the boundaries of commodification and coercion that marked the limits of free labor—and were themselves

37 For examples of Evans’ use of the terms “white slavery” and “wage slavery,” see “White Slavery,” Radical I, Vol. 3 (March 1841), 1; “The Problem of the Age,” Working Man’s Advocate, March 22, 1845; “Slavery—Both Kinds,” Young America, January 3, 1846. As David Roediger has pointed out, for Evans and others, “attacking white slavery, did not, however, necessarily mean accepting black slavery,” but adds that “in practice... [the antislavery] position proved exceedingly hard to maintain, and its supporters were inconsistent in advocating emancipation.” To Roediger, Evans best represents the “perils” of the “white slavery and antislavery” position. More recently, Mark Lause has made the case for Evans’ use of “wage slavery” rhetoric as a genuinely antislavery position. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 77–78; Lause, Young America, 74–75. I will return to this topic in more detail in Chapter Four.

147 challenged to hone their arguments about property rights that underlay the foundations of landed property, wage labor, and slavery. If few spokesmen for the labor movement saw the propriety in making distinctions between self-ownership and “wage slavery,” or between economic and extra-economic means of coercing labor, neither did their tendency to collapse the distinctions necessarily indicate support for, or even lack of concern about slavery. Land and labor reformers in the 1840s and after overwhelmingly used the language of “wage slavery” not in defense of chattel slavery, but as a means to attack an emerging and increasingly dominant understanding of free labor, defined as the right to sell one’s labor in a competitive market governed by freedom of contract.38

Perhaps the most sustained debate between abolitionists and labor reformers of the period took place in the pages of the Liberator between August 1846 and October 1847. The debate was touched off when the famed abolitionist Wendell Phillips wrote to Evans to contest his characterization of British abolitionists as hypocritical for their refusal to recognize the plight of landless laborers. Evans’ response justifies the impression that both the “white slavery” trope and the tactic of criticizing abolitionists’ supposed selectivity or hypocrisy were sometimes deployed as a rhetorical intervention intended to force abolitionists to reconsider what struck labor reformers as preconceived and contradictory notions about the larger organization of society and the place of labor within it. The initial article, Evans replied, had “had its intended effect, in drawing the attention of one so celebrated for philanthropy and eloquence to the comparative merits of the Abolition and National Reform methods of restoring Human Rights.” Indeed,

Phillips identified himself as a subscriber to Young America and claimed to “cordially sympathize” with the cause of land reform. But Phillips took issue with the land reformers’

38 For a particularly insidious version of the comparison between chattel and “wage” slavery published by a future National Reformer, see The Slavery of Poverty, with a Plan for Its Abolition (New York: John Windt, 1842). Evans published a similar “Dialogue on Free and Slave Labor” in the Working Man’s Advocate, June 8, 1844.

148 suggestion that landlessness was akin to a denial of the right to “self-ownership,” the concept that undergirded abolitionists’ identification of slavery with property in man.39

The exchange that followed lasted for much of the following year. In his preface to the exchange between Phillips and Evans, the Liberator’s temporary editor, Edmund Quincy, claimed that abolitionists were, in fact, attempting to elevate the condition of “down-trodden labor everywhere” by working to destroy slavery, “the chief obstacle” to labor’s redemption. But abolitionists just as often responded by minimizing wage workers’ grievances and defending the existing system of free labor in the North. Garrison had set the tone in the very first issue of the

Liberator, in which he denounced the efforts of trades unionists and strikers to “inflame the minds of our working classes against the more opulent, and to persuade men that they are condemned and oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy.”40 Phillips, too, initially denied that northern laborers, “as a class,” were “wronged or oppressed.” If they were, Phillips suggested, they need only look to their own thrift and industry and wait for the market to correct itself: “Does capital wrong them? Economy will make them capitalists. Does the crowded competition of cities reduce their wages? They have only to stay at home, devoted to other pursuits, and soon diminished supply will bring the remedy.” Citing the freedom of the wage laborer to choose his employer and make a contract for employment, Edmund Quincy turned to similarly liberal arguments in defending the free labor system. Capital and labor were complementary, not hostile; wage laborers may be dependent on their employers, Quincy admitted, “but not more so than the employer is dependent on the laborer.” Although he cited abolitionist “exceptions” to

39 “Wages and Chattel Slavery,” Liberator, September 4, 1846. 40 Liberator, January 1, 1831. Garrison’s comments were directed at the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and Other Workingmen.

149 such doctrines, like Gerrit Smith, John A. Collins, and William H. Channing, Quincy himself rejected any possibility of collaborating with the followers of such an “evil” doctrine.41

Evans, however, did not back away from what would come to be oft-repeated arguments about the similarity between chattel slavery and landless “wage slavery.” To be robbed of the right to land, Evans argued, was, “effectually,” to be robbed of the right to self-ownership. In proposing to free enslaved blacks without guaranteeing them the right to land, abolitionists were merely substituting wages for chattel slavery, Evans claimed; whereas “National Reform measures would not merely substitute one form of slavery for another, but would replace every form of slavery by entire freedom.”42 Quincy immediately accused Evans of “willingly attempt[ing] to confound” the distinction between slavery and free labor, and Garrison later complained that land reformers were “magnifying mole-hills into mountains.” But other voices weighed in on the side of land reformers. William West, a Boston Fourierist who, like Evans, considered himself both an abolitionist and a land reformer, came to Evans’ defense. In a series of letters to the editor of the Liberator, West accused Garrison and Quincy of “misrepresenting” the National Reformers and “impeaching the intelligence and integrity of those persons, who insist that the system of wages slavery is meaner than the system of chattel slavery.” The land reformers, West insisted, did “not hate chattel slavery less, but they hate wages slavery more.

Their rallying cry is, Down with all slavery, both chattel and wages!” Although West repeatedly claimed that his purpose was to convince abolitionists to “unite with the National Reformers” by demonstrating that “emancipation and the redemption of the soil” were intrinsically connected, his arguments clearly expressed a preference for the latter over the former. According to West,

“wage slavery” was “worse” than chattel slavery for a number of reasons. In an argument

41 October 1, 1847. 42 Ibid.

150 frequently resorted to by those who questioned the emerging system of laissez-faire free labor,

West pointed out that under the wage system, employers, unlike southern slaveholders, were under no compulsion to feed or clothe their workers, or provide for them in sickness or old age.

Worse yet, as opposed to the bald-faced oppression of chattel slavery, the veiled slavery of wages was insidious for the very fact that its exploitation was concealed by economic compulsion made it “deceptive,” so that even such “lovers of liberty” as the Garrisonian abolitionists mistook it for freedom. The “apparent freedom” of wage workers, then, was

“wholly fictitious,” since, “instead of being free to make their own contracts,” workers did so only “as bitter necessity forces upon them.” What others called “the slavery of poverty” or the

“lash of want” compelled workers to accept starvation wages or, when even those were not available, to face the threat of actual starvation. For West and others who thought like him, the bare freedom of the free laborer meant he or she was only “free to starve.”43

Much of the rancor, then, stemmed from fundamental disagreements between labor activists and abolitionists over the very nature of slavery and freedom. Labor reformers, perhaps naturally given their ideological needs, tended to define slavery as a system of labor, albeit one marked by an extreme form of domination and dependence. As Evans wrote to Gerrit Smith, slavery “consists in being subject to the will of a master, or a master class, by a deprivation of natural rights,” and William West complained of wage labor’s tendency to place workers “in a state of abject dependence upon capitalists.”44 Hence the labor reformers’ repeated insistence that different “degrees” or “grades” of slavery existed. It was not that all wage workers were in a worse condition than slaves, West explained, but “under certain possible” and “actually existing

43 Liberator, August 28, September 25, 1846; April 2, 23, 1847. For similar expressions of contrasting views in the period, see the essays written by in the Boston Quarterly Review, as well as O.B. Frothingham, “Pauperism and Slavery,” The Liberty Bell, January 1, 1853. For a compelling analysis of these debates, see Jonathan Glickstein, “Poverty Is Not Slavery: American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market,” 44 Liberator, September 25, 1846.

151 circumstances,” such as those of Irish famine victims or child factory workers in Britain, wage slaves were exposed to even greater suffering. Land reformers frequently cited the global nature and sheer numbers of those affected by land monopoly and “wage slavery” as reasons to prioritize it in the hierarchy of reforms; although they used the term “white slavery” interchangeably, only rarely did they resort to arguments that explicitly privileged white laborers over black ones. West estimated that nineteen-twentieths of the unemployed workers of the

North were “positively unable to find employers,” while Evans suggested that one-tenth of

England’s population were “paupers,” and estimated that the wage system bilked them out of one-third of their rightful earnings. “I admit,” Evans proclaimed, “and believe every National

Reformer will admit, that Negro Slavery is a great, an enormous, and a growing evil.” But not only did a “greater number” suffer from “the Slavery of Wages,” the spread of the wage relationship was proceeding even more rapidly than the spread of slavery in the Cotton

Kingdom. 45

For Evans, at least, the prioritization of “wage slavery” over chattel slavery represented a shift of emphasis rather than the total eclipse of his former antislavery sentiments. As he explained in an often-cited exchange with the abolitionist Gerrit Smith,

“I was formerly, like yourself, sir, a warm advocate of the abolition of slavery. This was before I saw there was white slavery. I now see, clearly, I think, that to give the landless black the privilege of changing masters now possessed by the landless white, would hardly be a benefit to him in exchange for his surety of support in sickness and old age.”46

45 “Reformatory. National Reform,” Liberator, August 28, 1846; “Wages and Chattel Slavery,” Liberator Sept. 4, 1846; “The New Constitution. No. II,” YA June 21, 1845; “Abolition at Home,” YA April 26, 1845; “Great Mass Meeting of the Working Classes at National Health: Comments of Alvin Bovay,” Young America II, No. 12 (June 14, 1845). 46 “To Gerrit Smith,” Working Man’s Advocate, July 6, 1844. In The Wages of Whiteness, David Roediger has made a similar point about the antislavery potential inherent in the language of “wage” or “white slavery,” although he ultimately reaches far different conclusions about its impact.

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The transition in status from slave to landless wage laborer would simply entail a “changing of masters”; not only would blacks not benefit from emancipation, they would be “the great loser[s] by such a change.” Although Evans reiterated that he remained “opposed to slavery in every form,” he now professed to believe that reformers should “begin our abolition efforts with that form of slavery that is nearest home.” But despite the implied justification for the slaveholding status quo that some (including Smith) read between these lines, Evans’ prioritization of land reform did not preclude the possibility of slave emancipation. Rather, it called for the adoption of what Evans described as a different “means of abolishing negro slavery.” Since the mere

“privilege of changing masters” would do little to benefit former slaves, “the black as well as the white must, in my opinion, have his right to land restored to him before he can be free.”47 In this sense, Evans was prescient both in foreseeing that slaveholders would not relinquish their human property without a fight and in foreshadowing the consequences of the failure to redistribute land to former slaves during Reconstruction.

National Reformers, Property Rights, and the Abolition of “All Slavery”

Abolitionists, of course, viewed slavery quite differently, defining it as the institution of property in man—the commodification of laborers, rather than simply of labor. As Henry

Highland Garnet put it before a British audience in 1850, “an American slave is an article of property—a chattel personal... [the English wage laborer] may be compelled to toil hard for a livelihood; but he toils for himself. He may not own an inch of soil; but he owns himself.”48

Abolitionists had been developing and refining the “property in man” argument since the early

1830s, when antislavery thinkers like Theodore Dwight Weld revived the liberal tradition of self-

47 Ibid. 48 “Garnet’s Plea for the Bondsman,” Christian News, October 17, 1850.

153 ownership as the essential condition of freedom, a tradition that may have originated with radical antislavery Puritans in the 1640s and that was refined by John Locke’s notion of a right to the fruits of one’s labor.49

But when confronted with abolitionist arguments about self-ownership, labor reformers most often rejected them as baseless abstractions. The Ohio Friend of Man, replying to the Anti-

Slavery Bugle, wondered “what more is the ‘right to himself’ than the right to a share of the soil?” The right to self-ownership had little practical benefit to the laborer “unless he has also a right to something to sustain himself.” Evans hoped that Wendell Phillips would one day see that

“men robbed of their land are robbed of themselves most effectually,” while William West insisted that, in effect, “wages slaves are the property of their employers... as long as their services are wanted. At all other times they belong to nobody, not even themselves.” West’s claim, made in the face of all evidence in a free labor environment defined increasingly by the universality of right to quit laws and the disappearance of indentured servitude, may simply have arisen from an excess of enthusiasm or rhetorical bluster. But even a land reformer with the antislavery credentials of Alvan Bovay, the abolitionist secretary of the National Reform

Association who would later play a key role in the founding of the Republican Party, was capable of conflating the republican definition of slavery as an extreme form of “dependence” with its legal definition as the right of property in another human being. Addressing a “mass meeting of the working classes,” Bovay wove in and out of the “dependence” and “property” definitions of slavery, claiming that the wage system “hemmed in and made [workers] dependent

49 James Oakes, “Slavery Is Theft,” Jacobin, August 13, 2015; https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/slavery-abolition- lincoln-oakes-property/. Accessed August 28th, 2015.

154 on the non-producing classes,” since an employer could “purchase the bones and sinew of the working men, and the laborers are practically dependent upon him.”50

As time went on, however, more sophisticated understandings of the importance of property rights, as well as more narrowly-drawn lines defining what could and could not be commodified in a national political economy governed by market principles, would become increasingly important to both abolitionists and land reformers. Despite their rejection of both abolitionists’ definition of freedom as self-ownership and of Thomas Skidmore’s call for a wholesale redistribution of property, the National Reformers’ vision of free labor was predicated on related arguments about the nature of property rights, ones that flowed logically from the labor theory of value. As Evans explained, “the use of the LAND is the equal natural right of all citizens of this and future generations... the land is not property, and, therefore, should not be transferable like the products of man’s labor.” This “great error,” according to Evans, made

“labor subject to the landlords, contracts the sphere of its operations, and deprives it of its just reward.”51 John Pickering, a Cincinnati workingman and amateur political economist who became something of a western spokesman for National Reform, made perhaps the period’s clearest connection between the labor theory of value and the natural right to the soil. In The

Working Man’s Political Economy (1847), a work he dedicated to “the Promotion of National

Reform,” Pickering concluded that legitimate “property consists of the products of human industry, or those things only which man creates, makes, or produces, by the energies of his physical capabilities.” Therefore, the land was “never to be confounded with property upon it— land itself, not being a product of human labor, cannot, in justice, be valued by money.” To

50 “That Land Question Again,” [Ohio] Friend of Man, in YA Jan 24, 1846; Wages and Chattel Slavery,” Liberator Sept. 4, 1846; “Reformatory. National Reform,” Liberator, August 28, 1846; “Great Mass Meeting of the Working Classes at National Health: Comments of Alvin Bovay,” Young America II, No. 12 (June 14, 1845). 51 “To the Working Men of the United States,” Radical I, Vol. 1 (January, 1841), 2.

155

Pickering, the idea of a property right in the “productions of nature” was “a perfect absurdity.”

“No error prevalent among men,” Pickering insisted, “has produced so much mischief, as that of confounding the products of human industry with the elements and spontaneous productions of nature.”52 Nor were National Reformers alone in making such a contention. The same year that

Pickering’s work was published, the abolitionist and editor of the Boston Daily Chronotype,

Elizur A. Wright, argued that land “does not and cannot come under the same category of other property, such as grain, cloth, metals, the product of industry.” Every individual had “a peculiar right to the products of his own industry... a right which cannot extend to... the air, the water, the soil, the rocks, and the mines, [which are] given for the common benefit of all.”53

As Pickering realized, appeals to property rights helped to “sustain... with the same propriety” both the convention of property in land and slaveholders’ claims to property in human beings. In fact, he recognized, such warped understandings of property rights were “the foundation of all kinds of slavery... The negro slaveholder justifies himself on the ground, that, because the laws of his country are in his favor, and allow him to traffic in human flesh, if he purchase and pay for a negro, he is, therefore, his bona fide property.” The laws propping up property in human beings did not, however, “make the transaction just or right,” since even slaveholders knew deep down that that their human property “had been stolen.” The practice of buying and selling land, Pickering argued, was “precisely similar: the one can no more be justified than the other.” And yet, Pickering reached the surprising conclusion that “so long as the working man of the North is denied the freedom of the soil,” the self-interest of white workers was opposed to emancipation. The existing inequalities in the ownership of property

52 John Pickering, The Working Man’s Political Economy, Founded on the Principle of Immutable Justice, and the Inalienable Rights of Man; Designed for the Promotion of National Reform, (Cincinnati: Thomas Varney, 1847), 37, 46-48; 28- 31. 53 Boston Daily Chronotype, quoted in the Voice of Industry, October 15, 1847.

156 would only be exacerbated by the liberation of enslaved blacks, who would automatically become another landless class that would add to the downward pressure on wages by competing for scarce jobs. To Pickering, the fight over slavery was one best left to the “gentleman capitalists,” “the Northern white slave driver and the Southern black slave driver.” Workingmen could fight a political battle to decide “which system is the best to suffer under”; or they could choose “to be free.”54

Whether Pickering genuinely hoped that the abolition of property in land would result in the liberation of slaves, or whether his statements reflected a profound ambivalence about the fate of enslaved workers, his particular formulation of the relationship between land reform and antislavery clearly privileged the former at the expense of the latter. But not all land reformers agreed. As we have seen, the National Reformers occasionally took strongly antislavery positions and even developed schemes for the eventual abolition of “all slavery.” Occasionally, they went beyond such abstractions to offer evidence of a deeper commitment to racial justice. In a lengthy article repudiating John Calhoun for his embrace of both land speculation and the

“positive good” position on slavery, Evans firmly rejected Calhoun’s “theory of holding the working classes of the South in perpetual slavery to all eternity because they happen to have dark skins and curly hair,” and averred that “the working classes of the North have intelligence to understand that most of the arguments that would apply in favor of Black Slavery would be equally applicable in favor of White Serfdom.” And Lewis Masquerier, addressing enslaved

African Americans directly, insisted that they had not only “an inalienable right to your bodies, but also to that domain which you have for ages cultivated for the use of your masters.” In a

54 Pickering, Political Economy, 46.

157 striking reversal of the logic of colonization, Masquerier told enslaved blacks that “you have more right to colonize your masters than they have you.”55

Statements like Masquerier’s may have been exceptional, representing the views of only a few idealists or eccentrics within the broader labor and land reform spectrum. Or they may have been the logical outgrowth of the egalitarian vision that labor reformers had championed since the 1790s, even if that vision was often clouded by a troubling nearsightedness on issues of slavery and race. But unlike their erstwhile “producerist” political allies among the slaveholders of the South or the New York Democracy represented by Tammany Hall, the land reform movement that grew out of the National Reform of the mid-1840s never resorted to the politics of race-baiting or to a repudiation or revision of the Declaration of Independence. The group’s proposed “Declaration of Rights,” to the contrary, embellished Jefferson’s original by adding:

“That all men have a natural and inalienable right to life, and, of consequence, to the use of land and the other material elements necessary to sustain life... [since] natural rights are of necessity equal rights, no man or set of men should make such use of the gifts of Nature as to deprive another of his natural inheritance, his rightful means of sustenance, education, and happiness.”56

Just as importantly, there were growing signs by the end of the decade that the land reformers’ engagement with abolitionists had had an impact. At times, and almost imperceptibly,

National Reformers began to add an insistence on the right to self-ownership to their demands for the right to free soil. The cover of the National Reform Almanac for 1848 thus read, “a man has a right to himself and to the use of enough of the earth’s surface to sustain himself and family.” [emphasis added] In the same volume, in a footnote to an essay by Gerrit Smith—a

55 “The Memphis Convention—Mr. Calhoun—Democracy of South Carolina—Universal Emancipation,” Young America, Dec. 13, 1845; “To Reformers, Tenants, Anti-Renters, Squatters, and Slaves,” [Lewis Masquerier to George Henry Evans, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, July 4, 1845], in YA July 12, 1845. 56 “The New Constitution. No. II,” YA June 21, 1845.

158 recent convert to and political ally of the land reform movement—George Henry Evans explained that “a man has no more right to acquire ‘landed property’ than property in man.

Neither can justly be property, therefore no one’s freedom is interfered with, by preventing its acquisition.”57

Perhaps most importantly of all, a handful of National Reformers perceived the potential for a development that the more doctrinaire Garrisonians did not—for what labor reformers would come to term the “Union of All Reforms.” The basis for this alliance, although it remained fragile, emerged in part from land reformers’ conviction that the social and economic forces that limited the freedom of free workers were ultimately the same ones that kept several million enslaved workers in a state of chattel bondage. “We do not doubt their sincerity, or question their motives,” the editor of the Friend of Man said of abolitionists; but “we differ in this particular; they think the Land Question has nothing to do with chattel slavery, and think it improper to connect them.” As William West put it, slave “emancipation and the redemption of the soil” were “indissolubly connected.”58 Such convictions, and the discursive debates that simultaneously challenged and reinforced them in the 1840s, would over the next decade contribute to the formation of a political coalition that would forever change the direction of northern politics and make antislavery a political force to be reckoned with.

57 National Reform Almanac for 1848 (New York: 1848). Evans’ footnote, signed “Editor of Young America,” appears on page 2 of Gerrit Smith’s essay on Land Monopoly (pages numbered separately). 58 “That Land Question Again,” [Ohio] Friend of Man, in YA Jan 24, 1846; Liberator, April 2, 1847.

159

CHAPTER FIVE “The Genius of Integral Emancipation”: Associationism and Antislavery

Perhaps no reform movement of the antebellum period has remained more obscure than the program of “universal” reform known as “Association” (or “Associationism”), the name chosen by followers of the French social theorist Charles Fourier on this side of the Atlantic.1 In one sense, the relative inattention given to Associationism by historians is warranted; the various

Fourierst organizations in the United States never claimed more than a few thousand members, and of the dozens of model communities they established in places like ,

Massachusetts; Monmouth, New Jersey; and Ceresco, Wisconsin, most collapsed within a few years. Most Associationist communities (referred to by Fourierists as “phalanxes”) left little tangible legacy other than a few crumbling buildings and some disillusioned followers.

Measured by the standard of what they hoped to accomplish—a sweeping social transformation based on the replacement of competitive wage labor by cooperation—the Associationists must be accounted an utter failure. But their significance remained evident to post-Civil War observers like . While Engels recognized the movement’s importance as a precursor to the

“scientific” socialism of Marx, he ultimately dismissed it as “”—a label which has proven enduring. Early twentieth-century labor historians largely followed Engels’ characterization; Norman Ware, for example, drew a strict line between the largely middle-class

Associationist reformers and genuinely working-class elements represented by the rank-and-file of groups like the New England Workingmen’s Association, and characterized the Fourierists as a group of out-of-touch dreamers who attempted to use the early labor movement to advance

1 Although the terms “Fourierism” and “Fourierist” (or at times, simply “socialism”) were used by contemporaries to describe the radical ideas inspired by Charles Fourier’s thinking—and although I use the terms interchangeably—in general I employ the terms “Associationism” and “Associationist,” in deference to the label preferred by most American followers of Fourier in the 1840s.

160 their own utopian ends.2 Even the most penetrating and thorough recent analysis of the

Associationist movement sees its accomplishments as residing primarily in the persistence of communitarian experimentation in the post-Civil War period, characterizing the involvement of many of the foremost Associationist figures in the antislavery crusades of the 1850s as a

“diversion” away from a more radical critique of northern society. In this telling, the utopian socialism of the 1840s merely “dissolved” into a free-labor consensus in the decade that followed.3

Accounts like these have missed what may have been the truly lasting legacy of

Fourierist labor reform in the United States: its contribution to the elaboration of the free labor thought that helped transform antislavery into a mainstream political movement by the 1850s.

The history of the Association movement also complicates the now-commonplace idea, repeated in many accounts of antebellum labor history, that northern white workers and their intellectual allies were uniformly hostile to abolitionism. Many, perhaps most, of the American followers of the Associationism conceived of the two movements as being closely related, even complementary. As the editor of Association’s official organ, the Harbinger, claimed, “we have always regarded the question of Slavery, as really and essentially that of Labor.”4 Far from being narrow ideologues the who cynically used the language of “wage slavery” to cloak a racist preference for white workers, the Associationists’ version of abolition—what they came to call the “Genius of Integral Emancipation”—was at the heart of a sweeping program of reform aimed

2 Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker 1840—1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924). 3 Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 10; 368-369. In Guarneri’s terms, American Fourierists “shifted their reform energies from the attack on ‘wage slavery’ to the crusade against chattel slavery” (Ibid., 3). 4 The Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October 1847).

161 at correcting the abuses of North and South alike, and bringing them into line with an egalitarian vision based on industrial cooperation and Christian social harmony.5

Although perhaps only a few thousand Americans ever joined an Associationist community, or phalanx, the movement demands attention if for no other reason than the prominence of many of the figures who became at involved at some point or other during the

1840s. As the labor historian John Commons once put it, “to enumerate the men and women who, as writers, speakers, and organisers, spread the gospel of association during the forties, is to name many of the leading historians, essayists, orators, journalists, poets, and artists of America at that time.”6 Commons’ quote, however, fails to quite capture the unique mix of secularism and religious perfectionism, Whiggish paternalism and Loco Foco egalitarianism, abolitionism and socialism that the Association movement represents. Its most prominent leaders embodied both the zeal for sweeping reform and the ideological contradictions of the time. Albert Brisbane, the most energetic and enthusiastic disseminator of Fourierist labor reform in the United States and a consistent adversary of competitive capitalism, was the well-born son of a New York merchant who had studied with Hegel as part of his education in Europe. Parke Godwin, another leading

Associationist, was a New York Democrat and associate of William Leggett and William Cullen

Bryant (he married Bryant’s daughter) who became a convert to Fourierism and antislavery. But perhaps more surprising given what historians have presumed was the inherent antagonism between the abolition and labor movements, Associationist reform commanded the attention of some of the leading antislavery intellectuals. As Liberty Party founder Gamaliel Bailey noted in a begrudginged compliment, “many of the most efficient advocates of [Association]... have

5 New-York Daily Tribune, June 3, 1850. The term may have been inspired by abolitionist Benjamin Lundy’s newspaper, The Genius of Universal Emancipation. 6 John R. Commons et al., eds. History of Labour in the United States, Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1918), 502.

162 sprung from the ranks of Abolitionists...” Although Bailey was generally hostile to the movement, his fellow Liberty Party founder, Theodore Dwight Weld (along with his wife, the abolitionist and feminist Angelika Grimké and her sister, Sarah), ran a Fourierist school in the

Raritan Bay Union, an Associationist community founded by fellow abolitionist and Liberty

Party supporter Marcus Spring. Leading figures at the heart of the Associationist movement included the Unitarian minister and theologian William Henry Channing, the newspaper editor

(and later Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War) Charles A. Dana, and the Transcendentalist,

Brook Farmer, and later co-editor of the New-York Tribune, George Ripley. Still other reformers closely connected to the abolition movement never explicitly identified themselves as

Associationists, but affiliated themselves with the movement and incorporated elements of

Fourierism in the various communities they helped to found in the period.7

Perhaps no figure represents the symbiosis between antislavery, labor reform, and

Fourierism than Horace Greeley. Greeley poured his intellectual energy and financial support into various Associationist enterprises from 1842, when he turned a column in his New York

Tribune over to an exposition of Fourierist social thought, until the end of the decade, when he turned increasingly to political antislavery, land reform, and coverage of New York City’s resurgent trades union movement. Greeley, of course, is remembered for his about-face when he turned against Reconstruction as a leader of the so-called “Liberal Republicans” after the Civil

War, as well as for his quixotic championing of various reforms and his frequently-strained

7 Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 25-27, 40-44, 254–55; Cincinnati Morning Herald, June 28, 1845. Abolitionists James Birney and Gerrit Smith both sent their sons to the school run by Weld, known as Eagleswood. American Anti-Slavery founder Arnold Buffum, whose daughter married Marcus Spring married, spent time at the community. See John L. Thomas, “Antislavery and Utopia,” in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 263. On numbers of Associationist communities and members, see “Table 1,” in “Appendix,” Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 407-08; Ware, Industrial Worker, 167; John Humphrey Noyes; History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: J.P. Lipencott, 1870), 11-13. Ware, citing Noyes, estimated a number of between 3,000 and 8,000 members of between thirty-four and forty-two Fourierist communities during the 1840s. Carl J. Guarneri, in the most exhaustive survey of the movement to date, uses a more conservative estimate of approximately 4,000 people in twenty-nine communities.

163 relations with both abolitionists and labor spokesmen. But other Associationists were well- entrenched within the Garrisonian fold. Elizur A. Wright, one of the most enthusiastic converts to Assoicationism, was a former corresponding secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

John A. Collins, a Garrisonian and graduate of Andover Theological Seminary, became converted to the cause of labor reform after being exposed to the ideas of Robert Owen, the

Chartists, and Fourier while on a fund-raising trip for the American Anti-Slavery Society in

England. His Skaneateles community in western New York veered between communitarianism and before collapsing in the mid-1840s. Other Garrisonians who experimented with utopian communities during the 1840s include Adin Ballou, George W. Benson, and Bronson

Alcott. Even Garrison himself, along with , attended a Fourierist-inflected

“Convention of the Friends of Social Reform” in Boston in December 1843.8

The presence of so many prominent abolitionists in a movement that had the overhaul of the existing relations of employment as its goal might in itself be enough to refute the assumption that the antislavery and labor reform were anathematic. Indeed, it was their emphasis on labor that sets the Associationists apart from the galaxy of utopian and perfectionist experiments undertaken during the 1840s. If their counterparts in the National Reform and New

England Workingmen’s Associations were the bearers of a strain of labor antislavery derived from revolutionary republicanism and the radical democratic movements of the 1820s and 30s, the Associationists suggest the central place that labor occupied in the minds of many abolitionists and others whose reformist instincts stemmed from more middle class, modernizing,

8 Thomas, “Antislavery and Utopia,” 254–59, 249—62; Lester Grosvenor Wells, “The Skaneateles Communal Experiment, 1843—1846: A Paper Read Before the Onondaga Historical Association, February 13, 1953 (Syracuse, New York: Onondaga Historical Association, 1953); “Social Reform Convention at Boston,” Phalanx I, January 5, 1844, 46-47. Greeley and Wright’s involvement with Associationism is described in detail below.

164 and religiously progressive tendencies.9 As Gamaliel Bailey insisted in a column responding to

Associationist concerns about northern labor, “Abolitionists are not insensible to the claims of the white working man; nor have they been indifferent to the various plans of social reform.”10

The Associationist movement underscores how seriously at least some reformers who were sympathetic to antislavery took the problem of the exploitation of non-slave labor. Among the

“Abuses of the Manufacturing System” that Brisbane enumerated in 1846, long working hours, the monotonous tasks demanded by the ever-more-minute division of labor, the “unhealthy and often deadly” conditions in chemical and metal plants, overly strict and arbitrary forms of work discipline and rules, and the fact that the greater share of profit was “absorbed by Capital and

Commerce” all merited inclusion.11 It was perhaps this sensitivity to the plight of the industrial worker that led the early twentieth-century labor historian Norman Ware to describe the

Associationists as “in their interpretation of the problem of the worker... more nearly at one with the working-class groups than any other of the reformers.”12

The backgrounds of the most prominent Associationist leaders, moreover—largely middle-class, evangelical or Unitarian, and Whig— also complicate efforts to characterize the class composition and cultural outlook of the early labor movement. The Associationists were for the most part far removed from the secular, Democratic ideology represented by the Locofocos and Working Men’s parties. But neither were they merely a set of utopian dreamers or middle- class dilettantes hoping to jump on the bandwagon of labor reform. The Fourierist phalanxes

9 Guarneri suggests that the name “Association” itself was derived from Henry Carey’s term for the specialization of labor and interdependence thought necessary in an industrializing society. Although Greeley’s embrace of Fourierism put him at odds with the leaders of the Whig Party, he was much more with mainstream Whigs in his adoption of many of Carey’s ideas on political economy. Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 39. 10 Bailey quoted in the Cincinnati Morning Herald, June 28, 1845. 11 New York Tribune, April 4, 1846. 12 Ware, Industrial Worker, 171.

165 attracted large numbers of artisans and mechanics, and the movement’s leaders made common cause with workingmen’s organizations like the New England Workingmen’s Association (later the New England Labor Reform League) and the National Reformers, with whom they collaborated and vied for leadership in the Industrial Congresses beginning in the mid-1840s.13

Although many remained dedicated to their ultimate goal of “the re-organization of society” into the phalanx and tended to view other reforms and approaches as “partial,” the Associationists had a pragmatic side as well. They embraced the basic tenets of the land reformers as well as the producers’ cooperatives and “Protective Unionism” that emerged later in the decade as necessary

“preliminary” reforms that would eventually lead to the harmonization of labor in Associationist communities. They united, under the imagined roof of the “phalanstery,” the upper-middle-class

Unitarianism and religious perfectionism of the Channings, the Whig-derived paternalism of

Greeley, and the Locofoco radicalism of Parke Godwin. And they thrust themselves headfirst into the debates then raging on the proper relationship between labor and capital and the place of slavery in a nation ostensibly dedicated to freedom, offering a greatly expanded vision of what a nation shorn of the chains of slavery might look like.14

For these reformers, the thorny problems of slavery and the organization of labor were inextricably intertwined, a conviction they clung to even as many abandoned the sweeping

13 Carl Guarneri has found that several of the most important phalanxes had majorities or near-majorities of artisans and craftsmen, including 67 percent at Brook Farm and 49 percent at Alphadelphia. See Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 170-71; Tables 11 and 12, Appendix, 415. A number of Associationists also played a leading role in the National Reform movement, most notably Albert Brisbane, Lewis Ryckman, and H. H. van Amringe. The connections between and collaboration among Associationists and National Reformers will be discussed in greater detail in a subsequent chapter. 14 A resolution of the American Union of Associationists, signed by Greeley, Channing, Dana, George Ripley, John S. Dwight, and others, was, although late in that organization’s career, typical of Associationist beliefs and goals. It read, in part: “Resolved, That by our professions and position as Socialists, we are and must be opposed necessarily to all forms of human oppression, whether of predial [tenant], chattel, or wages Slavery; that we seek by the organization of industry, finance, and the commerce upon mutual and coöperative bases, by the freedom of the soil in limitied quantities to actual settlers, by the exemption of the homestead from legal distraint, by the abolition of exhorbitant rent and interest upon capital; the immediate, entire, and complete extinction of all and every kind of Slavery... for Socialism, as we understand it and teach it, is the remedy for one and all forms of Slavery—is the genius of integral emancipation.” “Anniversary of the American Union of Associationists,” New York Tribune, June 3, 1850.

166 program of Fourierism for the more tangible goals put forth by abolitionism, land reform, or third-party politics. For many Associationists, the relationship between antislavery and labor reform was axiomatic. “There can be scarcely a social or political problem raised,” the editor of the Associationist Harbinger opined, “which does not assail slavery in its solution, and which does not involve also, the solution of that other problem, greatest of all, the Organization of

Labor.”15 Not only did the participation of abolitionists in the Association movement lend credence to such claims, but the debates between antislavery Associationists and those who remained committed to the “one idea” of immediate abolition—hashed out largely in the pages of antislavery newspapers, with which Associationist journals had an ongoing correspondence— helped to refine the distinctions between slavery and other forms of oppression and clarify the objectives of the antislavery movement. By pushing abolitionists to expand the parameters of what could and could not be commodified in a capitalist society beyond the benchmark of “self- ownership,” Associationists helped to pave the way for the rehabilitation of free labor that eventually became the basis of Republican Party ideology.

Property, Liberty, and Labor in Associationist Thought

“ASSOCIATION,” according to Albert Brisbane, was nothing less than “the SOCIAL

DESTINY of man... the true and natural system of Society, predestined for him by the Creator.”

At its most basic level, Association meant “the organization of Industry in the Township” or village, a unit of society that was familiar to all Americans and that was also at the heart of the

National Reformers’ land redistribution schemes. But the Associationist township, or “phalanx,” would be intentionally organized “so that unity of interests, concert of action, vast economies and general riches will be attained...and... a Social Order will be gradually established, in which

15 The Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October 1847).

167 peace, prosperity and happiness will be secured to all.” Associationists sought to revolutionize not only the political economy of the nation but its morality, its art, and its science. Its ultimate goal was to bring into harmony the relationship of labor with capital, of scientific social thought with Christian morality. Slavery, according to Brisbane, represented a refutation of both “divine law which proclaims the equality of human nature before God, and of Human law, which declares an equality of political rights.” Chattel slavery and “Industrial Slavery” alike were symptomatic of a greater “social evil” afflicting “Civilization,” which Associationists defined as the advanced industrializing economies of the United States and Europe. “Slavery, War, Poverty, and Oppression,” the Harbinger declared, “are inseparable from... the system of antagonistic interests... the only effectual remedy is the introduction of a higher system, the system of union of interests and union of industry.”16

If American Associationists retrofitted Fourierism for the American context with its references to chattel slavery, the germ of these ideas had taken root in the European social theories stemming from an and revolution. Born in 1772 in Besançon,

France, Charles Fourier grew up in the shadow of 1789. The son of a prosperous clothing merchant, he lost his inheritance when Parisian troops ransacked his stock during the siege of

Lyons; striking silk weavers in that city first brought his attention to the conflict between labor and capital. A wide-ranging and, in many ways, idiosyncratic thinker, Fourier bequeathed to his followers in both France and the United States a systematic, “scientific” approach for the complete overhaul of nearly all aspects of human society, including the relationships associated with sexuality and family—a point his enemies in both countries relentlessly hammered on and

16 Albert Brisbane, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, or Plan for a Re-Organization of Society (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1843), 3—4; Parke Godwin and the American Union of Associationists, Phalansterian Association: An Address to the People of the United States by the American Union of Associationists, (n.d., 1850?) 17; Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man, 109—13.; Harbinger quoted in the Liberator, 9 July 1847.

168 which his followers in the United States for the most part attempted to downplay.17 But at the heart of Fourier’s philosophy—and at the heart of its appeal to his followers in the United

States—lay the promise of the total reorganization of labor, and a significant challenge to the existing relations between labor and capital. Fourier hoped to draw on the human passions to render labor “attractive”; thus, each man, woman, or child would be able to perform the labor for which he or she was most naturally suited. Compensation would be allotted not only in the form of a shorter working day and increased time for leisure, but according to each occupation’s

“usefulness,” rather than its status or level of education or skill required. Thus the least desirable jobs, including those involving industrial and manual labor, would be among the best rewarded.18

Such an approach accorded well with the “producerist” ideology central to the

Democratically-inclined labor reformers of the period, but also to progressive, modernizing

Whigs like Horace Greeley. “Why may we not give to Labor a republican organization,” Horace

Greeley asked readers of the Tribune, “so that the workers shall freely choose their own chiefs or overlookers, regulate their own hours of daily toil, and divide the general product according to a preconcerted scale whose sole end shall be mutual and universal justice?”19 The extent to which the Associationist program answered these requirements explains its appeal to both ordinary workers and middle-class reformers. The core principles of the Associationist plan included: 1) a system of co-operative labor, based on the principle of “attractive industry” and organized into groups or “series”; 2) joint-stock ownership of the phalanx and the equitable distribution of its

17 See Charles Fourier, “Reméde aux divers esclavages,” in Charles Dain, De l’aboltion de l’esclavage (: Bureau de la Phalange, 1836) 25, 43-54. 18 Fourier’s life story and the basic outline of his philosophy can be found in a number of sources, including Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 16–20; Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man, iv–v and passsim; and Charles Pellarin, Life of Charles Fourier, trans. Francis G. Shaw (New York: W.H. Graham, 1848). 19 Horace Greeley, Hints Towards Reforms, 42; 38-39. Greeley’s proposed answer involved “the adoption of a law of Proportion or a rateable dividend to Capital and Labor in place of the present system of fixed and arbitrary wages,” a solution clearly derived from Fourierism.

169 profits; 3) the association of families in the phalanx community; 4) a system of “integral education” offered free of charge; and 5) a system of “mutual guarantees,” intended to “secur[e] to each member the products and resources that are necessary to sustain life, and the natural rights essential to happiness.” While Association promised to “elevate” skilled and unskilled manual labor, it also left a prominent place for intellectual labor (hence its appeal to writers and artists) as well as for capital, which was essential for the initial investment in the phalanxes as well as in the profit-sharing arrangements and the safety net provided by a system of “mutual guarantees” including life insurance and sickness and accident benefits. Like most middle-class political economists and many working-class labor reformers, Associationists believed in the notion of harmony between labor and capital, and strove to achieve a “unity of interests,” aimed at “associating the interests of all classes, and conciliating the individual with the good.” Despite attacks on “financiers, capitalists... and other industrial vampires,” Albert

Brisbane thus reassured readers of the staid Tribune that Associationists did not intend to “wage any special war against banks or corporations.” Rather, the goal was simply to “introduce justice” into the organization of labor, “instead of leaving it to the selfishness and cupidity of individuals.” In essence, capitalist means would be used to achieve socialist ends.20

Brisbane, Greeley and others also emphasized that Associationism preserved the sanctity of individual property. As Greeley explained, Association “wars upon no Rights of Property, would take nothing from the Rich to bestow on the Poor.” Indeed, the well-off had a valuable philanthropic role to play, in assisting “all earnest efforts of the Laboring Class to emancipate and elevate themselves.”21 Although they called for a more equitable division of property as a

20 Alexander Longley, Fourier Phalanx Agreement (Cincinnati, n.d.); Constitution of the Boston Union of Associationists (Boston, 1848); Brisbane, “The Organization of Labor—No. II,” New York Tribune, April 4, 1846. 21 Greeley, Hints Towards Reform, 40.

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“preliminary” to the creation of Fourierist phalanxes, several key elements of the Associationist plan, including joint stock ownership and profit-sharing arrangements for workers, were nonetheless wholly dependent on private property and capital investment. Even speculation and earning “non-usurious” interest on investments were legitimate, since both represented a return on capital, which was itself the product of past labor.22 Citing the “communism” of the Owenite communities as the reason for their downfall, Brisbane warned that “Community of Property is the grave of individual Liberty.” “The great defect” of previous plans for cooperative labor, explained Parke Godwin, “was that the individual has been swallowed up in the Community, in utter contradiction to our natural sense of independence and justice.” Rather than abolishing individual property, Association would “extend its right and the means of acquiring it to every member of society.”23

It was not the institution of private property, but its concentration in the hands of a few, that Associationists saw as lying at the heart of the problems ailing antebellum society.

Inequalities of wealth and property were at the heart of Associationist critiques of emerging capitalism, a concern they shared with their Jacksonian predecessors in the Working Men’s and

Equal Rights parties and their more Democratic-leaning counterparts in the land reform movement. Vast inequalities, whether of the kind represented by chattel slavery or by the superiority of capital over labor, were not only a “a subversion of natural law,” they were a violation of “that relation which a just God has created between man and man.” The vaunted right to protections for property, then, meant nothing if it did not include the right to the fruits of one’s labor. This logical extension of the so-called “labor theory of value” owed as much to

22 “Brook Farm Phalanx Constitution,” in the Phalanx, 28 May 1845; Brisbane, “Interest on Capital,” Harbinger III, no. 6 (18 July 1846); Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 139. See also the section entitled “To Capitalists,” in the article describing the formation of the “American Phalanx” in Belmont County, Ohio, in the Phalanx, 5 December 1843. 23 Godwin, Phalansterian Association, 9; Brisbane, Concise Exposition, 9–10.

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Adam Smith as it did to David Ricardo. As Brook Farmer Charles Hosmer reminded an audience of workingmen, “You... by your labor, produce, create, as it were, wealth. And who has a juster

[sic] right to enjoy this than the laborer himself?”24

Brisbane built on Fourier’s rigid distinctions of class as well as those outlined by Orestes

Brownson, perhaps the first American economic thinker to designate a new category within the familiar dichotomy of “producers” and “non-producers”: what Brownson called the

“proletaries.”25 Estimating from averages taken from a representative sampling of industrializing nations, Brisbane claimed that fully two-thirds of the population of “civilized” nations belonged to this group, the “hired” or “wages classes.”26 In fact, he claimed—rather more outlandishly— given that fewer than one in ten Americans held substantial property, “as a general rule

Individual Property did not exist” in the United States. Thus “slaves, serfs [and] poor hired laborers” could be thus combined into the category of “dependents,” whose propertylessness made them subject to a host of “tyrannies.” “The Mechanic and Laborer can no longer look forward as in former years with the hope of securing a home for old age,” Brisbane explained, “but consider themselves fortunate if they can satisfy present exigences [sic] and obtain the means of subsistence for the day.” The Harbinger similarly observed that “the

24 [Charles Hosmer], The Condition of Labor: An Address to the Members of the Labor Reform League of New England; in a Speech in Support of Some Resolution Offered at Their Late Convention in Boston, By One of the Members (Boston: Published by the Author, 1847), 8; 27. On the influence of Ricardian economics and the meaning of the labor theory of value as interpreted by workingmen, see Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 157-58, as well as Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911). 25 Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review 3 (July 1840), 366-67. Brownson was himself influenced by Saint Simon and other “French radicals” whose thinking bore a more than superficial resemblance to that of Fourier. American Fourierites were nonetheless disappointed in Brownson’s failure to support their efforts, despite the similarities between their class analysis and their shared roots in European social thought. See Brownson on Brisbane, “Albert Brisbane,” Democratic Review 11 (September 1842), 303-4; on Fourierism, Boston Quarterly Review 1 (October 1844) 450-87; the Phalanx, June 29, 1844. For Brisbane’s use of the term “proletaries,” see Arthur Bestor, “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas 9 [1948]: 264. 26 Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man, 63. Brownson estimated the number of propertyless wage workers, those with only their labor power to sell, to be closer to one-half. Given the available statistics on wage labor (cited in the Introduction and in note 28, below), these numbers would seem to be a vast exaggeration; still, both Brownson and Brisbane were perceptive enough to see that the ranks of propertyless wage laborers would only continue to grow as the century wore on.

172 operative, owning no land, farm, workshop, utensils, capital, must sell himself” on the market for wage labor. Not only did the propertyless class comprise the majority, but an alarming number— perhaps three or four million Americans out of a non-slave population of fifteen million—were

“in a state of comparative or extreme destitution.” Such poverty was as avoidable as it was immoral. The Phalanx quoted approvingly abolitionist ’s argument that, contrary to the “false theories” of Malthusian political economists, to accept poverty as an inevitable by- product of an advancing civilization was “as impious as it is absurd.”27

Central to the Associationists’ analysis of the conditions which had brought about this degrading cycle of poverty and dependence was their identification of wage labor as the basis of the economic and social relations governing society under industrial capitalism. As the

Harbinger observed, “one of the leading and invariable characteristics of civilization is, that its work is done for wages; hired labor is a permanent institution as closely interwoven with all the structure of civilized society, as chattel slavery is with barbarism.” Although estimates about the numbers of wage workers in the North before the Civil War vary, it seems clear that for many northerners, the spread of wage labor and the decline of self-employment was an alarming phenomenon.28 Horace Greeley sounded the tone in recognizing that “labor in our day has

27 Brisbane, Concise Exposition, 5–7, 9; Harbinger II, no. 25 (30 May 1846); Amasa Walker, “Starvation not Unavoidable,” Phalanx, 10 August 1844 (reprinted from the Christian Citizen). Walker specifically singled out the English as a violation of free trade, leading to an unnatural distribution of wealth. Walker’s political journey from Jacksonian Democrat to Liberty Party to Free Soiler to Republican typifies that of those who combined free trade convictions with antislavery. Walker later became a professor of political economy at Amherst University, where he was a strenuous advocate of laissez-faire and of the harmony between labor and capital. 28 “Labor for Wages,” Harbinger II, no. 20 (25 April 1846), 318. See also Phalanx, December 9, 1844; Harbinger II, no. 25 (May 30, 1846); “Wages and Chattel Slavery,” Harbinger V, no. 3 (26 June 1847), 38; “Wages Slavery,” Harbinger VI, no. 21 (25 March 1848), 164. For estimates on wage labor in the period, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16–18, 33–34, 242–243, 331–333; Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 28–30; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xvi–xvii; Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), 36–37. John Ashworth, citing Stanley Lebergott, uses the estimate of forty percent for the number of Americans employed as wage workers in 1860, but argues that the implications of this rise for both the cause of antislavery and for northern society were “profoundly alarming.” For Eric Foner and David Montgomery, the salient point is that wage workers had come to outnumber the self- employed by the outbreak of the Civil War. See John Ashworth, The Republic in Crisis, 1848–1861, 24.

173 become so extensively a commodity... that it is most essential to all fair dealing that it be measured as definitely and equally as possible.” Others went further; the cordwainer and former

Brook Farmer Charles Hosmer proclaimed before a group of fellow workingmen that “the whole system of labor for wages is wrong, an accursed system...When you labor for wages there is no hope, much less, actual fruition.” In the eyes of observers like Hosmer and the Harbinger,

“civilized society” was deeply flawed. Just as the abolition of slavery would lift southern society out of barbarism, so the abolition of wage labor would lift northern society out of “civilization.”29

Given the rapid spread of wage labor in the United States during the early decades of the nineteenth century, Associationists and other labor reformers feared the American worker would soon occupy a similarly degraded status. Despite its democratic form of government and its considerable natural advantages, Brisbane warned, the United States was steadily “moving onward to the misery of the old World.” Unless Americans sought to “effect peacefully a Social

Reform,” the U.S. would soon “sink into the poverty and ignorance in which Europe is plunged.”30 Such historicized accounts of the development of wage labor and comparisons to conditions in other industrializing nations were central to Associationists’ attacks on both capitalist economic arrangements and slavery. The Harbinger dutifully collected statistics and comparisons of wage rates not only throughout the United States but in Manchester and

Liverpool; in Ireland, France, and India. It published in its entirety Robert Dale Owen’s address on the “history of wages,” in which the son of the legendary reformer traced the development of wage labor to the labor shortage arising from Edward III’s mid-fourteenth-century wars with

France. Using wage statutes and price comparisons, Owen concluded that British workers were

29 Greeley, Hints Towards Reform, 28-29; [Hosmer], The Condition of Labor, 21; Harbinger, April 25, 1846. 30 Brisbane, Concise Exposition, 5–7.

174 no better off in the nineteenth century than they had been in the fourteenth.31 Brisbane identified a historical progression in which three “leading systems of labor” had predominated at different times in history: slavery, which he defined as “the servitude of man to man”; serfdom, defined as

“the servitude of man to the soil”; and “hired labor, or the wages system,” defined as “the servitude of man to capital.”32 For the abolitionist and Brook Farmer John S. Dwight, the civilization of the West at mid-century was nothing more than a system of “civilized plunder, or modern trade, in which it is the ambition of everyone to be a consumer without being a producer.” Wage labor, the Harbinger insisted, was the direct outgrowth of the outmoded systems of organizing labor under and slavery, systems which were themselves rooted in unjust and unfounded concentrations of productive property. Far from being “inevitable,” wage labor was an “intrinsically unjust... remnant of the relations between the capitalist and the laborer, which existed originally under the systems of Slavery and Serfdom.” Tracing a historical progression from slavery to serfdom to “Civilization,” the Harbinger argued that the latter phase,

“through its whole course has been a progressive emancipation of labor, a series of successive struggles... by which the slaves and serfs of earlier times have been elevated to the condition of citizens.”33

The acknowledgment of every man’s right to himself, and to the product of his labor, thus represented the last, great achievement of civilized society. But according to the Harbinger, the capitalist societies of the North and Europe fell short of this mark; for the mere

“acknowledgment of this right” did not imply its “establishment.” The “power of transmitted

31 Ibid., March 25, 1848. The National Era, a paper which combined antislavery with support for labor reform, published a respectful rebuttal to both Owen’s and the Harbinger’s conclusions about wage fluctuations and the historic conditions of laborers. See the National Era, April 20, 1848. 32 Harbinger, 15 January, 25 March 1848; New York Tribune, April 4, 1846. 33 John S. Dwight, Lecture on Association, In Its Connection with Education, Delivered Before the New England Fourier Society, February 29th, 1844 (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1844), 6; Harbinger II, no. 25 (30 May 1846). See also [Hosmer], The Condition of Labor, 7.

175 custom” still influenced the laws making strikes and labor unions illegal and governed the market in wage labor. Chief among these relics of feudalism was the unfair concentration of

“property... still held and transmitted under usages which originated in feudal times.”

Civilization claimed to acknowledge the principles of free labor, offering protections for private property, but had so far failed to provide “the necessary conditions of that freedom,” ownership of land and productive property. Wages, therefore, not only represented an unfair share of the profits created by the addition of labor to capital, but were a “dividend, which constantly decreases, in proportion as laborers multiply, and which varies with every whim of the capitalist, or change in the market.” Appealing directly to workers, the Harbinger implored them to turn away from the agitation for ten-hour laws (then dominating the attention of the labor movement) and to set their sights on more comprehensive reform. Only that reform “which shall abolish

Hired Labor, and substitute coöperative labor,” the Harbinger insisted, could “guarantee to every man, woman, and child, the right to labor and the fruit thereof.”34

Addressing a group of workingmen at the Convention of the Labor Reform League of

New England in Boston in 1847, Charles Hosmer outlined the basic Fourierist scheme: “I advise that laborers should associate themselves, and any capital they may have, together, and employ their labor and their capital jointly, dividing among themselves, according to some equitable scheme, giving to labor a certain proportion, and a certain proportion to capital, the profits of their associated industry.”35 The abolition of wage labor and the substitution of cooperation for competition under Fourierist Association took on a number of forms, most of them variations of

34 Harbinger II, no. 20 (25 April 1846). 35 [Hosmer], The Condition of Labor, 28. Among the distinctly Fourierist-sounding resolutions passed by the convention Hosmer addressed were those resolving that “the evils which oppress and burden the men and women of New England, arise from a vicious social organization,” and that “we do not look to political action, but to the Organization of Labor, and the Association of Laborers, whereby they shall work for themselves, and not for another, and receive the Profits of their own Labor.” The resolutions were reprinted in the Voice of Industry, February 12; February 19, 1847.

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Fourier’s suggestion for the division of the profits of industry in the ratio of two-thirds to labor, one-third to capital. The constitution of Brook Farm, Hosmer’s former residence, offered one example of how such a plan might be put into effect. The total profit of the Brook Farm

Phalanx—the name adopted by the famed Transcendentalist community in Western

Massachusetts after it embraced Fourierism in 1844—would be assessed on a yearly basis. After subtracting , insurance, the expenses of the governing General Council and expenditures for education, medical expenses, and repairs, the remainder would be divided between the investors who held stock in the phalanx and the laborers who worked it. Of the two-thirds paid out to labor, the highest dividend would be paid to that labor deemed to be in the category of

“Necessity,” the next highest to “Usefulness,” and the lowest to “Attractiveness.” Additional incentive was to be provided by the reward to Labor of double the percentage earned by the

Partnership stock, so that the interests of labor and capital would be quite literally

“harmonized.”36 The North American Phalanx in Monmouth County, New Jersey, after several years of trial and error, arrived at an even more complex scheme of dividing profits and rewards, allowing for greater variety in “simple,” “mixed” and “compound” variations in the division of tasks, and providing additional rewards for “extra efficiency,” “extra skill, or tact,” “orderliness,” and “talent,” divided into organizational, administrative, and inventive capacities.37 Association

“does not retain in any shape or form the Wages-system,” the Harbinger claimed, but instead substituted a system in which “every man shall have the free use of the gains of past labor... and he shall himself become the owner of exactly that measure of property which he has added to the common wealth.” The effect, hoped the authors of the Brook Farm Constitution, “will be to

36 “Brook Farm Phalanx Constitution,” Phalanx, May 28, 1845; Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 51-52. Brook Farm’s transition to Fourierism was facilitated by Greeley and a New York cordwainer and labor reformer, Lewis Ryckman. 37 “Key to Scale of Primary Awards for Labor and the Use of Capital In the North American Phalanx, 1853” (Red Bank, N.J., 1853).

177 make every one a proprietor, and thus to inspire a sense of ownership, a spirit of independence, a love of order and a real interest in the rights of property.”38

In addition to an analysis predicated on the recognition of the development of a permanent class of propertyless wage earners, Associationists developed a definition of freedom that went far beyond the purview of the strain of liberal individualist “” that dominated thinking on political economy and governed economic relations at the time. If

Associationist definitions of “slavery” sometimes strained credulity, their definitions of freedom were equally capacious. “It is a beggarly and contemptible notion of Freedom, which confines it to the right to locomotion or the right to vote,” Godwin explained. “Freedom to Labor” was the logical outgrowth, indeed the foundation, of civil and political freedom.39 Elsewhere

Associationists defined “genuine freedom” as “the right to have our whole nature unfolded and perfected, by a complete and sound education in youth, by a choice of the best society at all periods, and by a free access to well-furnished libraries and a complete scientific apparatus; and finally, the right to an unrestrained choice of a profession...”40 Expanding the parameters of freedom for white laborers in the North would at once neutralize proslavery arguments about the callousness of northern society and create an opening wedge for antislavery, for “when it shall have been made to appear that the social respect and emoluments of the free laborer, great as they may be compared with those of the slave, are utterly mean and insufficient for the wants of a human being... will not men every where declare slavery to be utterly odious and intolerable?”41

38 “Labor for Wages,” Harbinger II, no. 25 (30 May 1846), 395; “Brook Farm Phalanx Constitution,” Phalanx, May 28, 1845. The constitution’s authors likely included George Ripley, Charles Dana, and Brisbane. 39 Godwin, “Phalansterian Association,” 15. 40 [Parke Godwin?], “Plain Lecture on Association.” 41 Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October 1847).

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Devising a system of “mutual guarantees”—ranging from sickness and death benefits to life insurance to mutual credit banks—Associationists counteracted one of the main criticisms of

“wage slavery” and prefigured the modern social safety net. Just as the owners of the new industrial enterprises tried to maximize profits and minimize risk by relying on a pool of competitive wage labor—often drawn from the most vulnerable populations, including women, children, immigrants, and the unskilled—Associationists attempted to redistribute the burden of risk from the individual worker to the collective phalanx, just as proponents of the would later attempt to redistribute it to the state. The system of “guarantyism” also pointed the way towards the solution for a problem about which abolitionists had little to say, and which the editor of the Harbinger claimed the example of West Indian emancipation had brought into stark relief. “It is now felt that emancipation is comparatively worthless if it provide not the conditions of freedom, by guarantying homes to the emancipated, and securing them against impositions from land-lordism and commercial duplicity,” the Harbinger cautioned. “Simple emancipation is not enough to ask for... it ought to be demanded, that Society shall be reformed as to guarantee, that slavery shall never again be re-established, and that the right to labor, and a just remuneration for labor and a comfortable support, and educational privileges shall be offered to the enfranchised slaves.” At once paternalistic and prescient, the need to combine emancipation with a guarantee that the abolition of slavery would be permanent, as well as the demand for land and education for emancipated slaves, prefigured the arguments that Radical Republicans, not to mention the freedmen and -women themselves, would make during Reconstruction.42

The Associationists, Slavery, and Abolitionism

42 Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October1847). The antislavery Associationist Elizur Wright, Jr., was one of the pioneers of modern life insurance, while mutual credit schemes, the brainchild of French anarchist Jean-Pierre Proudhon, were popularized in the United States by Charles Dana. See Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 283-89.

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It was this commitment to an expansive definition of property rights and the ideological move away from classical liberal definitions of that Associationists shared with National Reformers and others who insisted that the right to property included the right to the fruits of one’s labor. Associationist definitions of what constituted legitimate property, however, did not extend to include a right to property in slaves; as the Harbinger made clear,

“we absolutely deny the right of any man to claim property in another man.”43

But if Associationists agreed with abolitionists on the basic definition of slavery as the right to hold property in human beings, they elsewhere defined slavery so expansively as to strain the limits of credibility. In a letter to the Anti-Slavery Convention in Cincinnati that infuriated abolitionists, Horace Greeley—then at the height of his zeal for Associationism— criticized more traditional understandings of slavery and recommended substituting a definition of slavery as “that condition in which one human being exists mainly as a convenience for other human beings.” To Greeley, slavery appeared to mean simply an extreme form of subordination, which might include forced obedience or servility, the subjugation of one class by another, the engrossment of land by landowners, or the tendency to squeeze wages to the point of starvation.44

Similarly, the Harbinger devised a typology of nine separate species of “slavery” in an article published the same year as Greeley’ letter. Although “chattel Slavery” ranked at the top of the list, “Slavery of the soil” and “Slavery of Capital, [or] hired labor,” as well as the “Sale and seclusion of women in seraglios,” “Military Conscriptions and Impressments,” and “Perpetual

Monastic Vows” all merited inclusion. Declining his invitation to attend the Cincinnati convention, Greeley outraged abolitionists by explaining that “if I am less troubled concerning

43 Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October 1847). 44 Horace Greeley to the Anti-Slavery Convention, 3 June 1845, New York Daily Tribune 20 June 1845 (originally printed in the Cincinnati Morning Herald).

180 the Slavery prevalent in Charleston or New-Orleans, it is because I see so much Slavery in New-

York.” For Greeley and likeminded reformers, “slavery” was literally everywhere. But this heightened awareness of slavery’s ubiquity, Greeley claimed, caused him to deem slavery not a lesser but a “greater evil” than did most abolitionists.45

Regardless, in defining slavery so capaciously, Greeley was merely building on a line of argument that was already well established. As we have seen, many of the arguments about

“wage slavery” had already been rehearsed by the debates between Chartists, factory reformers, and land reformers during the 1830s.46 Indeed, metaphorical formulations comparing various forms of injustice to slavery had been ubiquitous in the Anglophone Atlantic world since at least the eighteenth century. Labor reformers, like their republican and Revolutionary forebears, used chattel slavery as the ultimate metaphorical expression of oppression par excellence.47 Thus the prolabor Northampton Democrat defined slavery as “the deprivation of freedom” that occurred when man’s “right to all that he produces” is infringed. The Awl defined it as “subjection to the will of another,” whether the “other” was an individual slave master or a class of capital-owning employers. As an analysis of the material conditions that defined the actual experience of chattel slavery, then, the labor reformers’ use of “wage slavery” or “white slavery” was woefully inadequate, not to mention equivocal. Depending on the context, the terms could be used to attack both the enslavement of blacks and the oppression of white wage workers; to prioritize the

45 Harbinger I, no. 2 (21 June 1845); Greeley to Anti-Slavery Convention, 3 June 1845. The letter was reprinted in Hints Toward Reforms, 352–57. 46 David Brion Davis paid considerable attention to various metaphorical uses of slavery in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); see especially pp. 39–40, 263, 283, 388, 560–64. On the use of the “wage slavery” and “white slavery” metaphors, the genealogy of these terms and their use by labor reformers, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 20, 27–29. 65–72, 77–80, 149–50, 176. On the Chartists and slavery, see Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 47 As Walter Johnson has recently pointed out, Karl Marx, along with a host of Marxist-inspired labor reformers who followed him, used the term “wage slavery” in much the same sense. See Walter Johnson, “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 2004), 306.

181 amelioration of wage workers’ conditions over that faced by chattel slaves; or to defend chattel slavery by comparing it favorably to the lot of white wage workers. Garrison would regularly place labor reform arguments about “wage slavery” in his “Refuge of Oppression” column, and later, in the 1850s, southerners like George Fitzhugh would pounce on them to advance a critique of northern society that served their own proslavery ends. While some of the comparisons between black slaves and white wage workers may have been disingenuous, propagandistic, or downright racist, then, they must also be seen as part of an ongoing effort by workers and reformers to understand the rapidly-changing nature of the employment relationship and the role of producers in a world where systems of production were being revolutionized.48

But for Associationists, the antislavery implications of the “wage slavery” argument generally outweighed the proslavery ones. Not only did Associationists view attacks on “the wages system” as part of a broader reorganization of society that would result in the abolition of

“all slavery,” but in their debates with abolitionists—and in the schisms that eventually emerged in their own ranks over the issue of whether the abolition of wages or chattel slavery should take precedence—they helped to clarify and strengthen antislavery arguments about the illegitimacy of property in man.49

One instructive case surrounds an exchange between Wendell Phillips and the editors of the Harbinger, George Ripley and Albert Brisbane, during the summer of 1847. A number of pro-labor and land reform papers, including the Harbinger, had reprinted an excerpt from a speech given by Phillips before a gathering of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, in

48 Northampton Democrat, quoted in the Voice of Industry, 13 August 1847; The Awl, 25 October 1845. For an extended discussion of the pro- and anti-slavery uses of the terms “wage slavery” and “white slavery” by workers, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 65–72, 77–80. 49 Mark A. Lause has recently made a strong argument about the antislavery implications of the “wage slavery” argument when used by National Reformers. See Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 74–75.

182 which the abolitionist was quoted as saying that the suffering of Irish peasants and northern factory operatives “will not be lost sight of in sympathy for the Southern slave.” Phillips quickly wrote a letter to the Liberator, hoping to correct the “erroneous impression” that “I placed the laborer of the North and the slave on the same level, and talked perhaps of ‘white slavery,’ or

‘wages slavery,’ &c.” In an oft-quoted passage, Phillips made it plain that he rejected such comparisons, and argued that the conditions faced by American workers were not even remotely analogous to those prevailing in Europe. “Except in a few crowded cities and a few manufacturing towns,” Phillips claimed, “I believe the terms ‘wage slavery’ and ‘white slavery’ would be utterly unintelligible to an audience of laboring people, as applied to themselves.” He went on to explain that:

There are two prominent points which distinguish the laborers of this country from the slaves. First, the laborers, as a class, are neither wronged nor oppressed: and secondly, if they were, they possess ample power to defend themselves, by the exercise of their own acknowledged rights... Does capital wrong them? Economy will make them capitalists. Does the crowded competition of cities reduce their wages? They have only to stay at home, devoted to other pursuits, and soon diminished supply will bring the remedy. 50

Quotes like this have often been used by historians to evoke the notion of an unbridgeable wall of ideological separation between abolitionists and labor reformers. But what has often been overlooked—aside from the fact that Phillips himself would later re-evaluate such views, garnering a deserved reputation as a champion of labor in the decades after the Civil

War—is that quotes like the one above existed in the context of a dynamic intellectual engagement between laborites and abolitionists. In re-examining the ongoing dialectic between abolitionists and labor reformers that took shape during the 1840s, the triumph of the

50 “The Liberator on the Question of Labor,” Harbinger V (17 July 1847), 92-93; The Liberator, 9 July 1847.

183 abolitionists’ defense of classical liberal notions of economic freedom seems inevitable only in retrospect.51

Responding to such defenses, Associationists were forced to hone and sharpen their critique. As previous historians have noted, the labor reformers’ tendency to view oppression in class, rather than individual, terms is one of the things that contributed to the ideological distance between them and the Garrisonian abolitionists.52 George Ripley, in the Harbinger, shot back that “We are sorry that Mr. Phillips has no better method to propose of elevating the laborer in this country, than the preaching of ‘economy, self-denial, temperance, education, and moral and religious character.’ It is a poor consolation to tell the haggard operative in our factories... that he can escape the wrongs of capital by becoming a capitalist himself. This may give relief to individuals who have craft and skill sufficient to apply the rule; but the class remains...”53 The

Harbinger instead set out to convince workingmen and abolitionists alike that “the sufferings and degradations of the laboring classes” were the product of the “system of Labor for Wages” itself. In contrast to Phillips’ faith in free-market competition and its natural tendency to maintain an equilibrium between supply and demand, Associationists believed that “wasteful” competition in the market created a race to the bottom, thus tending “to sink all classes of worker to an equilibrium.” In contrast to his belief that competition would serve as a disciplining force,

51 By the end of the Civil War, if not earlier, Phillips had embraced the eight-hour movement and other aspects of labor reform. At the Labor Reform Convention in Worcester in 1871, Phillips presented a list of resolutions that included an affirmation of “the principle, that labor, the creator of wealth, is entitled to all it creates,” as well as pledges “to overthrow the whole profit-making system,” and a declaration of “war with the wages system, which... enslaves the working-man.” See Wendell Phillips, Remarks of Wendell Phillips at the Mass Meeting of Workingmen in , Nov. 2nd, 1865 (Boston: Voice Printing and Publishing Co., 1865), as well as “The foundation of the labor movement,” and “The labor question,” in Wendell Phillips and Theodore Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 152- 167 and 168-177. For an evaluation of Phillips’ relationship to the labor movement, see James B. Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero. (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 259. 52 See, for example, Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834—1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 235—60. For an abolitionist response to Brownson’s class analysis, see “Prospects and Projects of the Democracy,” Emancipator, 31 December 1840. 53 Harbinger V, no. 6 (17 July 1847).

184 inculcating workers with the values of “economy” and temperance, Associationists believed that the “forced selfishness” created by competition in the labor market led the worker to “the most hideous wronging of himself, to the putting down of the best instincts of humanity within him.”

Thus competition caused “every man” to become “an unnatural tyrant” with nothing but disregard for “the rights of other men.” The “rule of Might makes Right,” the Harbinger intoned, made possible not only slavery but “the extortions of commerce... the cruel formalities of soul- less corporations, [and] the oppressions of the wages system.” Competition was at the “root of

Slavery”; “while this is every where, there must be Slavery somewhere.”54

Perhaps most significantly, Associationists added important caveats to the labor theory of value and the abolitionist article of faith about self-ownership as the essential condition of freedom, which they used to develop a more sophisticated version of the “wage slavery” critique than that that had come before them. As we have seen, most labor reformers subscribed to some version of the labor theory of value, derived from Locke and Smith, which they extrapolated into a labor theory of property: since all property originated in labor, the laborer had a right to some equivalent of the value of the product of one’s labor—to the “fruits of their labor.” Early

“socialists,” like William Godwin in the 1790s and William Thompson in the 1820s, had become perhaps the first to articulate a theory of a right to the “whole product” of labor, rather than a portion thereof. In the heat of the mid-1840s debates over the future of slavery, a few

Associationists went even further. Claiming property in a portion of the product of a worker’s labor, some argued, differed only in degree from claiming the entire product, or even from claiming ownership of the worker himself. As Charles Hosmer put it, God “created all equal: not a part to sell themselves, whether more or less completely, any more than to be sold, to the rest,

54 Harbinger, 6 December 1845; 23 October 1847.

185 at whatever price their necessities may compel them to take.” Given the “direct antagonism between labor and capital” and the present “superiority” of capital over labor, the wage laborer

“stands in the market-place like a slave, and is bought by the highest bidder, like any other commodity.” Any arrangement which claimed some portion of the product of another’s labor as profit—what Marx would later call surplus value—lay on a spectrum of illegitimacy, on the extreme end of which was the ownership of laborers themselves as in chattel slavery.55

As Hosmer’s reference to a higher power suggests, the distance from “natural rights” to divinely-ordained ones was a short one for religion-minded Associationists who merged

Fourierism with what might be described as an early form of Christian socialism. Perhaps the most sophisticated and eloquent proponent of an explicitly religious variant of Associationist thought was William H. Channing. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the scion of a famous family of religiously-motivated reformers, Channing presided over a Unitarian church in

Cincinnati and the independent “Christian Union” in New York City, where Greeley, Godwin, and Henry James, Sr., were members.56 For Channing, the radical reform of free labor was simply the rational extension of antislavery: “logically,” Channing said, “I have never been able to separate the anti-slavery movement from all those which are directed to raise Labor universally.” In the early 1840s, he had been inspired by , a follower of Saint-

Simon, whose teachings about the interdependence of humanity also influenced Orestes

Brownson and Parke Godwin. He soon became convinced that the Christian socialism of Leroux,

55 [Charles Hosmer], The Condition of Labor, 7-8. On the development and genealogy of theories of the right to “the whole product of labor,” see Chapter One, above, as well as Lowenthal, Ricardian Socialists, and Anton Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour: The Origin and Development of Labour’s Claim to the Whole Product of Industry (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899). Other thinkers in the period, most notably Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, would famously take this dictate yet further to declare that “property is theft.” But, despite a brief interest in Proudhonism on the part of Horace Greeley and Charles Dana that coincided with the Tribune’s of the 1848 Revolution in France (described below), few if any American Associationists would explicitly call for the abolition of all property. 56 Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 54-55; “A Typical American: Memoir of William Henry Channing,” New York Times, 5 December 1886.

186

Saint-Simon, and Fourier represented a truly Christian alternative to the avarice and social disorder created by laissez-faire capitalism. Later, he was among those who persuaded the

Transcendentalists at Brook Farm to adopt Fourierism. In Boston, Channing and James T.

Fisher—a wealthy merchant who served on that city’s Committee of Vigilance and funded abolitionist propaganda—founded the Religious Union of Associationists, intended to further reconcile Fourierist teachings with Christianity.57

For a time, Channing’s work on behalf of labor appeared to overshadow his commitment to antislavery. In the mid-1840s, Channing lectured extensively before the New England

Workingman’s Association with Greeley, Brisbane, and Dana, and with Brisbane and Ryckman at the Female Labor Reform Association’s Industrial Reform Lyceum at Lowell, although he continued to speak before abolitionist meetings.58 But the annexation of Texas and ensuing war with Mexico re-ignited his antislavery convictions. In the pages of the Harbinger, he railed against annexation schemes as evidence of the “Slave Power”; after war broke out, he preached disunion at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, proposing a reconstituted “Union of

Freemen” that would exclude slave states. In May 1846, he penned a resolution, subsequently adopted by the American Union of Associationists (for which Channing served as Corresponding

Secretary), pledging to “in no way to aid the Government of the United States, or of the several

States, in carrying on war against Mexico.”59

Channing’s denunciations of “wage slavery,” then, were highly qualified. At an “Anti-

Slavery Celebration” in Waltham, Massachusetts, in July 1847, he took pains to distance himself

57 Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 55, 259; Channing quoted in the Liberator, 14 June 1850. 58 Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 257—61; 301; 303; 393. After the Civil War, Channing would continue his pro-labor activism in the New England Labor Reform League. 59 Channing, “Cassius M. Clay’s Appeal,” Harbinger I, (20 October 1845); Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Fifteenth Annual Report (Boston, 1847), 93; John S. Dwight “Convention in Boston,” 411.

187 from “reformers of the Mike Walsh and Northampton Democrat stamp”; he was not disposed, he said, “to lose sight of the far worse evils of the South.” He knew that his labor advocacy “might be thought to complicate the question,” but his involvement in antislavery had led him increasingly towards support for a broader reformation of society. The question of slavery

“touches upon the question of capital and labor,” Channing insisted, “and abolitionists must look at it.” Indeed they had a “duty” to embrace a more radical and sweeping critique of northern society, since the Mexican War had provided direct evidence that “Northern capitalists were combined with Southern slaveholders to manage and control labor.” Channing pledged to

“earnestly press” the issues of “land distribution and co-operative industry” at future anti-slavery meetings. “Should we not confront capital, and say, it shall not rule us?” he pointedly asked his abolitionist audience.60

Channing’s speech at Waltham was strongly rebuffed by Garrisonians like Edmund

Quincy, who replied with the by-now familiar argument that “the [free] labourer was the sovereign, and had in his own hands the power to remedy the evil.” Intoning that “a man must own himself before he can own anything else,” James N. Buffum insisted that the abolition of slavery was the only way to bring about “a general reform in the condition of man throughout the world.” But Channing agreed with his rhetorical adversaries that self-ownership was essential— his uncle, abolitionist William E. Channing, had done much to disseminate the principle in his seminal 1835 work, Slavery, and Channing had said as much in the very same speech. Privately,

60 “Waltham Celebration,” The Liberator, July 16, 1847; National Anti-Slavery Standard, August 5, 1847 (reprinted from the Lowell Journal). I have reconstructed Channing’s speech from the accounts given in these two sources.

188 he had reached the same conclusion as Buffum, that “the Anti-Slavery victory must be won, before our day of triumph for Association can come.”61

The National Anti-Slavery Standard, the organ of the Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery

Society, continued the debate into the fall, reversing the Associationist argument by insisting that

“the assertion of the first right of man—the right to himself... underlies all other reforms.” The slave’s status as a human chattel represented “all the difference in the world” between slaves and even the most impoverished freemen, the Standard argued; “poverty is not Slavery.”62 The

Harbinger responded in conciliatory tones, evidently pleased that the Standard’s editor

“addresses us as brother men and reformers... in a tone which makes it possible for us to discuss together the great interests of man, in the hope of being mutually enlightened.” Associationists, the Harbinger explained, had “no fault to find” with the Garrisonians’ ideas about black equality, but it did find the Standard to be “much mistaken in its theory of Slavery.” Rather than being rooted in racist notions propped up by any “speculative conclusion that the slave is not a man,” the institution of slavery rested on simple truths about human nature and behavior. Since all men and women were governed by self-interest, when they were placed under “a system of universal competition and antagonism of interests... in the absence of a true organization of labor, one

61Ibid.; Channing to Maria Weston Chapman, 29 September 1846, Weston Collection, Boston Public Library. For the elder Channing on self-ownership and the abolitionist objection to property in human beings, see William E. Channing, Slavery (Boston: James Monroe and Company, 1835). Buffum, a wealthy Quaker businessman from Lynn, Massachusetts, further claimed that workingmen had already rejected antislavery—a surprising statement given the well-documented support for abolition among the shoemakers of his hometown, where Buffum would later serve as mayor. See his obituary in , June 13, 1887. On Lynn shoemakers and antislavery, see Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists’ Constituency (New York: Greenwood Press, 1984), 44-49; 86-89, as well as Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge and New York: Harvard University Press, 1976). 62 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 5 August, 14 October 1847. The Standard may have been referencing a notorious pamphlet published by National Reformer John Windt. See Windt, The Slavery of Poverty, Together with a Plan for Its Abolition (New York: The New-York Society for the Abolition of All Slavery, 1842). For a more in-depth discussion of the ideological differences between abolitionists and labor reformers, see Jonathan Glickstein, “Poverty is not Slavery: American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market,” in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge, La: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 195-218.

189 man’s interest can only assert itself at the expense of another man’s interest.”63 It was simple economic self-interest, in a society organized around competition rather than the harmony of interests, that propped up both the property regime of slave labor and the unequal relations of property that undergirded wage labor.

Associationist Antislavery and the Politics of the 1840s

Despite the close connections between abolitionists and Associationists—and despite the implicit attack on slavery that lurked behind the Associationist critique of employment relations under industrial capitalism—specific schemes for the abolition of slavery were never central to the Fourierist project in the United States. Chattel slavery, Associationists seemed to believe, would simply disappear once the phalanxes were organized and “wage slavery” abolished.

Although concrete Associationist schemes for the emancipation and resettlement of slaves were lacking—as is evidence of black participation in the phalanxes—a few tentative outlines did emerge. Parke Godwin had emerged as an opponent of slavery by the early 1840s, a somewhat surprising development given his pro-Texas annexation stance and Democratic proclivities (and at least one instance of privately expressed racism). Encountering a newspaper article about the plans to resettle some four hundred slaves emancipated by John Randolph in Virginia, Godwin wrote to Charles Dana “to see whether there be not some of our people, who would be willing and able to take these poor fellows, and organize their labour,” thus embarking on a “grand experiment... leading if successful God knows whither!” If emancipated slaves could be made into “freemen and productive loving Christians, by the machinery of organization” under

Association, Godwin speculated, “what becomes of your slavery question and slavery too?”64

63 Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October 1847), 329-30. 64 Parke Godwin to Charles Dana, Sept. 8, 1845. Bryant-Godwin Collection, New York Public Library.

190

Interestingly, the only concrete plans for Associationist emancipation emanated from the efforts of two southern-born Fourierists, Osborne Macdaniel and Marx Edgeworth Lazarus.

Macdaniel, born in Georgetown in the District of Columbia, wrote with Brisbane that slavery was “opposed to both the spirit of Democracy, and to the spirit of Christianity,” but agreed with him and most other Fourierists that the primary cause of slavery was the erroneous view that labor was “repugnant and dishonorable.” Since chattel slavery represented only one branch of the

“universal slavery” to which labor was subjected, the immediate emancipation of the abolitionists was only a “narrow” and “partial” reform that would only “produce a state of things in which the slaves are worse off than before.”65 Associationists like Macdaniel and Brisbane, however, attempted to balance this apparently judicious concern for the fate of emancipated blacks with the acknowledgment that “the whole industry of the South... is dependent upon slave-labor,” as well as a circumspect concern that “the rights of the master may be spoliated.”

Whether these “rights” implied for Macdaniel and Brisbane (if not for the editors of the

Harbinger a few years later), a right to property in human beings is unclear. But what does emerge from an examination of his emancipation schemes is the deeply ambiguous role that race played for many northern labor reformers, Associationists not excepted.

Macdaniel’s solution to the problem of slavery and emancipation crystallized after an extended trip to Louisiana beginning in April 1847, in the midst of serious reflection over the slavery issue prompted by the Mexican War. Drawing on connections with a handful of

Louisiana Fourierists—among them sugar planters John D. Wilkins, Robert Wilson, and Thomas

May, and New Orleans lawyers Thomas J. Durant and T. Wharton Collens—Macdaniel drew up an Associationist plan in which enslaved blacks would “earn” their freedom, working to

65 Phalanx, 4 November 1843.

191 construct Fourierist phalanxes until they had accumulated enough earnings to compensate their former masters at market value. Utilizing the Fourierist approach of cooperative, “attractive” labor, Macdaniel’s slaves would thus “establish Association with the Whites,” although the latter would gradually replace the former as emancipated slaves were replaced by new slaves as well as white laborers, with the former slaves eventually colonized outside the United States. The

North Carolina-born Lazarus’s plan was similar—blacks would work extra hours for wages in order to purchase their freedom, thus inculcating them with the values of capitalist discipline— but his emancipated slaves would remain in the South, although whether they would eventually be allowed to join the phalanxes is unclear.66

Neither the implicit racism of these plans or their insistence on gradual, compensated emancipation and eventual colonization were unusual among those whites who supported emancipation in the antebellum U.S.; indeed, certain aspects seem to have been borrowed from

John McDonogh, a paternalistic Louisiana planter who allowed his slaves to purchase their freedom by working for wages, as well as from Frances Wright’s Nashoba community.67 But if the proposals of Macdaniel and Lazarus were not extraordinary, the Associationist response to them was. The editors of the Harbinger printed Lazarus’s scheme only reluctantly, disavowing any responsibility for his views on either slavery or African Americans. At the AUA convention that year, William H. Channing introduced a motion that would have required the organization to refuse any financial contributions from slaveholders (the motion was narrowly defeated). Then, after one of Macdaniel’s lectures from his southern tour was reprinted in the Franklin, Louisiana

Planters’ Banner, northern readers inundated the Harbinger with letters to the editor, like the

66 In describing Macdaniel and Lazarus’s emancipation plans, I have relied heavily on Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 262—267. 67 Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 262; Frances Wright, “A Plan,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, October 15, 1825, 58-59.

192 one from J.L. Clarke, a Providence Associationist who wrote that “I exceedingly regret that the position of the Associationists [on slavery and the abolition movement] should be thus stated, because it appears to me to be untrue, both in spirit and in fact... The claim of right of property, by one class of men, in the bodies and souls of another class of their fellow beings, is so monstrously unjust and unnatural, that for persons who propose to reform society, to give this claim any acknowledgment or respect is most absurdly inconsistent.” A Cincinnati newspaper, after praising other measures recently proposed by Associationists, blasted Macdaniel’s lecture as “pandering” to slaveholders, “admitting their claim of property... and apologizing for Slavery in true Calhoun style, by deprecating liberty.” A slaveowner truly acting in accordance with the principles of Association, the author implied, would “emancipate his slaves, and compensate them for the past injustice he has inflicted upon them.” [italics added] The Boston Daily

Chronotype compared Lazarus’s plan for compensated emancipation to the paying of ransom to kidnappers. Meanwhile, Macdaniel, responding to Clarke’s letter, tried to back away from his

Louisiana lecture, claiming to “heartily unite with Abolitionists in condemning Slavery as a gross violation of human rights,” but insisting that a more “practical solution” that that formed by abolitionists’ appeals to slaveholders’ consciences must be undertaken. The question,

Macdaniel complained, “has never been answered — what is the remedy?”68

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, however, the nation seemed farther away than ever to a remedy for the problem of slavery, despite the efforts of Henry Clay, Stephen

Douglas, and other politicians to craft the series of compromise measures over the issue of slavery in the territories that would become known as the . That same year, one of the clearest, and most dramatic, demonstrations of the differences between antislavery

68 Harbinger V, 25 September 1847; “Annual Meeting of the American Union of Associationists” and “Mr. Macdaniel’s Lecture,”; Ibid., 19 June 1847; “Our Policy—Slavery—Letter from Mr. Macdaniel,” Ibid., Vol. 6, July 17, 1847; Boston Daily Chronotype, 9 January 1850.

193

Associationists and Garrisonian abolitionists took place. Addressing the New England

Antislavery Convention in Boston, William H. Channing conceded that abolitionists “have recognized the great, fundamental principle of this Nation, as regards personal liberty.” But personal liberty, or self-ownership, also “covers the whole domain of OWNERSHIP and

WORK.” Channing believed that the abolitionists’ failure to extend their belief in equal rights to

“social” ends explained their failure to attract northern laborers to the antislavery cause.

Although he had come to agree that “the first great work of Reform in these United States is

Anti-Slavery,” he chastised abolitionists for failing to extend their principles to their logical conclusions. “Interlink the Anti-Slavery movement with the movements for the elevation of

Work,” Channing proposed,” and “the highest Ideal of our Nation will be realized.”69

Garrison’s response was predictably withering. After first accusing Channing of maligning the abolitionist movement, Garrison ridiculed the meager accomplishments of

Association, citing its failure to elicit widespread support as evidence of the fallaciousness of

Channing’s claims. “What signal success has yet crowned the Fourier movement,” Garrison demanded, “to what extent has it secured the confidence and awakened the zeal of the white laboring classes?” But the crux of Garrison’s rebuttal lay in his theory of the Constitution— which ironically lay closer to the “negative liberty” and “compact theory” of proslavery constitutionalists like John C. Calhoun than to either the Associationists’ expansive definition of freedom or the Liberty Party’s antislavery Constitution.70 In contrast to Channing’s careful distinction between “the people” and “the government,” and thus “the American Union” from

“the American Constitution,” Garrison advanced an abolitionist version of the compact theory of

69 The Liberator, 14 June 1850. For the impact of the events of 1848 in Europe on the U.S. labor movement more generally, see Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immgrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 70 See W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

194 the Constitution in advocating the secession of Massachusetts from the United States.

Massachusetts, Garrison explained, had entered into a “compact” with a slaveholding union—a union that only existed by virtue of the Constitution, for “where was the Union before the adoption of the Constitution?” Since that compact was, for Garrison—in famous words he now repeated here, “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell”— free states like

Massachusetts had every right to secede. For Garrison, the “duty” of abolitionists was not to confront capital or expand the parameters of antislavery reform, but to demand secession from the Union. 71

Most Associationists did not accept the disunionism of Garrison or Channing, and the latter’s secession talk became a point of serious tension within the movement, drawing a furious response from Parke Godwin, who denounced Channing’s anti-Mexican War resolution.

Nonetheless, the war and its aftermath marked a decisive turning point for the Association movement. Along with the failure of many of the Fourierist communities, the Mexican War prodded many Associationists into a reconsideration of some of their cherished tenets. Some, like Channing, temporarily turned inward, focusing on the spiritual dimensions of Fourierism in his Religious Union of Associationists (sometimes known as the “Church of Humanity”). Many others, including the movement’s most important leaders, accepted that the time for the re- organization of society into phalanxes was not yet nigh (or blamed them on premature attempts without first accumulating the proper capital or memberships) and turned to “partial” or

“preliminary” reforms. These included an active interest and participation in the producers’ cooperatives formed by workingmen and women in the New England Labor Reform League; support for free homesteads, land limitation, and the other tenets of the National Reformers; and

71 The Liberator, 14 June 1850.

195 the collaboration with the latter, and with workingmen generally, in the Industrial Congresses of the late 1840s and 1850s.72

Just as importantly, many Associationists began to reconsider both their opposition to political involvement and their prioritization of “integral emancipation” over the abolition of chattel slavery. The Harbinger hailed the advent of the Liberty Party in 1847, praising “both its spirit and its method” of uniting antislavery with “a general land and labor reform.” This development, the Harbinger hoped, “promises to arch over the gulf, which has unfortunately been widening, between the Abolitionists on the one hand, and the advocates of a Land and

Labor Reform on the other.” To some Associationists, the rise of the Liberty Party only proved that there had never really been any “real ground of collision and conflict between” the two movements, but that they were, “on the contrary, the complement of each other.”73

Meanwhile, the term “free soil” had come into increasing circulation by labor reformers, thanks largely to the efforts of the National Reformers, who may have coined the term at their state convention in Albany in October 1846, where they endorsed the Liberty Party candidate for governor on a “Free Soil” ticket.74 Somewhat quixotically given his early endorsement of both

Associationism and land reform, Horace Greeley was a relative latecomer to the Free Soil movement. Still loyal to the Whigs and bruised by a controversy over the merits of Fourierism with the editor of the conservative Courier and Enquirer, Greeley largely abandoned Association by the end of the decade.75 Despite his long record of support for antislavery and his opposition to the Mexican War, he did little to burnish his antislavery credentials during his brief tenure in

72 On the Industrial Congress and other collaborations with land reformers and other working-class movements, see Chapter Seven, below. 73 Harbinger V, no. 20 (23 October 1847), 319-20; 392-93. 74 Lause, Young America, 77-78. 75 Horace Greeley and Henry J. Raymond, Association Discussed; or, The Socialism of the Tribune Examined, Being a Controversy between the New York Tribune and the Courier and Enquirer (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847).

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Congress during the winter of 1848-49. Finally pushed over the top by the Kansas-Nebraska crisis of 1854, Greeley would embrace the Republicans, quickly becoming influential within the new party. And yet it would be Greeley who received the most credit for prodding the

Republican Party towards an embrace of labor and land reform, culminating in the passage of the

Homestead Act in 1863.76 As the following chapters suggests, that credit is largely deserved.

After all, it was Greeley who had claimed, in the aftermath of the controversy between

Association and abolition during the American Anti-Slavery Conference in Cincinnati in 1845, that his “leading idea” was simply that “Slavery is to be abolished, or at least its abolition rendered feasible, by improving and elevating the condition of the Free Laborer, white or black, male or female.”77 This would indeed become the leading idea of the next decade—the idea behind the political party whose election to power would trigger secession and war, ultimately resulting in the destruction of slavery.

76 For a classic rendering of this interpretation of Greeley, see John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Sept., 1909), 468-488. 77 New York Tribune, June 20, 1845.

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CHAPTER six “That Every Man, Who Desires a Farm, Should Have One”: Gerrit Smith’s Antislavery Frontier

Gerrit Smith has been largely forgotten, but he once ranked among the best-known figures in American public life. After his death, the New York Times wrote that “the history of the most important half century of our national life will be imperfectly written if it fails to place

Gerrit Smith in the front rank of the men whose influence was most felt in the accomplishments of its results.” Smith’s claim to fame was based largely on his abolitionism, the movement to which he dedicated most of his considerable intellectual, moral, and philanthropic energy. But he was also an active supporter, over the course of his long life, of temperance, women’s rights, pacifism, free trade, and land reform.1

Smith was also one of the country’s largest landowners. Beginning in the mid-1840s, he would embark on an unprecedented scheme to give away thousands of acres of land to poor New

Yorkers, black and white. Smith’s father, Peter Smith, had amassed nearly one million acres of land in upstate New York after reinvesting profits made as a partner in John Jacob Astor’s fur- trading business and marrying into the elite Livingston family. Ensconced in the family mansion on a vast estate in the village of Peterboro, in Madison County, young Gerrit lived the isolated life of a country squire. But he constantly chafed against the elitist expectations of the landlord class he was born into, seeking escape first in the poetry of as a youthful literature

1 Quoted in LouAnn Wurst, “‘For the Means of Your Subsistence... Look Under God to Your Own Industry and Frugality’: Life and Labor in Gerrit Smith’s Peterboro,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, No. 3 (September, 2002), 199. The best recent biography of Smith can be found in John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001). For an encapsulated collection of Smith’s thinking on land reform that hints at his broader legacy, see William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., introduction, Gerrit Smith on Land Monopoly [Sketch of Smith], with Introduction by Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the Younger (Chicago: Public Publishing Co., 1898).

199 student, and later finding an outlet for his considerable intellectual and philanthropic talents in a variety of reform activities, including temperance, land reform, and abolitionism.2

In some ways, however, Smith’s early life was not as sheltered as this brief biography suggests. He gained firsthand experience of both slavery and physical labor at an early age, having been forced to perform manual labor alongside his father’s slaves until the age of sixteen; an early biographer attributed to this experience the origin of Smith’s sympathy for the plight of both enslaved and free workers. Nor was Smith’s early life untouched by tragedy; his mother and first wife both died within months of one another, a younger brother is believed to have been mentally unstable, while his older brother became a hopeless alcoholic, a development that led to

Gerrit’s lifelong involvement in temperance reform.3

Smith had long been interested in abolitionism. Like many early abolitionists, including

William Lloyd Garrison, he joined the American Colonization Society in 1827, but his antislavery resolve was strengthened after he witnessed a mob attack on an antislavery convention in Utica in 1835, on the same day that Garrison was violently assaulted by an anti- abolition mob in Boston. By the late 1830s, Smith had repudiated colonizationism and garnered a reputation as an uncompromising advocate of immediate abolition. But his refusal to rule out violent means as a method of last resort for the eradication of slavery eventually led to his split with the American Anti-Slavery Society, and later to the presidency of the New York State

Vigilance Committee. Smith was involved with the Liberty Party almost from its inception; he, along with Myron Holley, was responsible for issuing the 1840 call to political abolitionists to

2 Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 71–82; Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), LouAnn Wurst, “‘For the Means of Your Subsistence,’” 159–172. 3 Frothingham, Gerrit Smith; Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 102–03. Interestingly, Frothingham had earlier written an abolitionist critique of labor reformers’ conflation of poverty and slavery; see O.F. Frothingham, “Pauperism and Slavery,” Liberty Bell, January 1, 1853.

200 meet in Albany that April to consider making independent nominations for president, and several sources credit Smith with supplying the party its name.4

Despite his unshakeable commitment to the “one idea” of abolitionism, Smith eventually moved to the forefront of the small group within the Liberty Party that helped steer it towards the embrace of a broader reform platform, culminating in the breakaway Macedon Convention of 1847. Smith’s political evolution was gradual, but several major developments of the period appear to have set him on the road that led towards an embrace of what contemporaries sometimes referred to as “universal reform”—that which took into consideration deeply-rooted structures of inequality and economic injustice. In May 1837, only weeks after the death of

Smith’s father, banks suspended specie payment in response to the financial panic that was then unfolding. Smith saw the value of his landholdings drop precipitously; his in Oswego

County, for example, dropped from about one million dollars in value to $120,000 overnight.

Unlike thousands of Americans of lesser means, Smith would largely recover from the disaster, but he shared with many ordinary workingmen and farmers the Panic’s grim lessons about the vicissitudes of economic security amid the boom-and-bust cycles that marked America’s developing . Like fellow Liberty Party founders Joshua Leavitt and William

Goodell, Smith blamed the Panic in part on the economic stranglehold of the “Slave Power.” In

1838, Smith condemned those workingmen who had served as the willing tools of “gentlemen of property and standing” during anti-abolition riots, and warned them that “the same spirit” that enslaved African Americans would as soon “brutalize and enslave the poor white man.”5

The turning point in Smith’s conversion to land reform, however, originated in an extraordinary exchange of letters with George Henry Evans, beginning in July 1844. In that

4 Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 99–101. 5 Ibid., 102–03, 117.

201 month, the head of the newly-formed National Reform Association penned an open letter to the famed abolitionist bluntly informing him that, as the owner of some fifty thousand acres of land in upstate New York, “you are one of the largest Slaveholders in the United States.” More boldly still, Evans went on to suggest that Smith might rectify the situation, and redeem himself, by donating his fifty thousand acres to “fifty thousand destitute inhabitants of the cities,” who, by Evans’ lights were the “virtual slaves” of landowners like Smith.6

Smith’s reply, published in the Working Man’s Advocate two weeks later, pulled similarly few punches. It also held some surprises in store. Claiming to have been previously ignorant of the National Reformers’ existence, Smith expressed his warm support for the idea of free government land grants to actual settlers, informing Evans that he had “cherished for years” the idea of large landowners dividing up their lands to give them away to the poor, although the noted the obstacle posed by the fact that many landowners owed considerable debts on their holdings. But also he held Evans’ feet to the fire, chastising Democratic labor reformers for their support of the slaveholder President James K. Polk, their justification of violence and denial of

African-American voting rights in the aftermath of the Dorr Rebellion, and their support for segregating blacks into separate townships after land reform had been accomplished. Most pointedly, he turned the tables on Evans, indicting his “white slavery” rhetoric for justifying the perpetuation of slavery:

You will deny that you justify it. Nonetheless, you do justify it, when you say that poverty is as bad as slavery—nay, is even identical with it. Were you, and your wife, and children, bought and sold and torn asunder, by Southern masters, and urged to your daily tasks by the Southern lash; and were I to answer the appeals in your behalf with the cold-hearted and

6 “To Gerrit Smith,” Working Man’s Advocate, 6 July 1844; reprinted in the People’s Rights, 24 July 1844.

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truthless remark, that your condition is no worse than that of the Northern poor man, you would, most properly, accuse me of justifying your enslavement.7

Until labor reformers gave up their fears of alienating their working-class and immigrant constituency by adopting a forthright antislavery position, Smith could not support them. “Every association in this land, that would successfully prosecute a benevolent scheme, must first join the Abolitionists... Good men cannot keep out of this partnership.” Moreover, until land reformers embraced a vision of “human rights” that included African Americans on a basis of equality, their project was doomed to fail. “Make the experiment,” Smith urged.8

The experiment would be made—by both sides. In his reply to Evans, Smith had quoted

William Leggett’s challenge to “convince me that a principle is right in the abstract, and I will reduce it to practice, if I can.” Apparently, Smith did become convinced. By 1846, he was hailing land reform as “the greatest of all Anti-Slavery measures.”9 The key to Smith’s conversion to land reform was his conviction that, unlike the imprecise or dissembling comparisons implied by other incarnations of the “wage slavery/white slavery” thesis, land reform represented a viable way to operationalize antislavery while securing the freedom and independence of the greatest number of citizens. For Smith, the relationship between antislavery and land reform was axiomatic. “The abolition of land monopoly in America,” he wrote in 1847,

“would be the abolition of Slavery in America.” Smith cited several reasons for this, but none was more important than the assumption that the implementation of land reform would entail

7 Gerrit Smith to George H. Evans, July 8, 1844, published as “Gerrit Smith’s Reply,” Working Man’s Advocate, 20 July 1844. 8 Ibid. 9 “Letter of Gerrit Smith”[from Young America], Voice of Industry, 20 November 1846. See also Working Man’s Advocate, 20 July, 20 August 1844; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 44; Gerrit Smith to Evans et al., 4 January 1850, in Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University. Apparently unaware of Smith’s conversion, Horace Greeley joined in the chorus of land reform criticism, publicly shaming Smith at the 1846 New York Constitutional Convention for hoarding excessive lands and thereby denying “the use of the soil to those who need it.”9

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“the breaking up of plantations—of tracts of several hundred, and in many instances, of thousands of acres—into farms of fifty or a hundred acres.” Such a redistribution, Smith prophesied, “would leave but little room, little occasion for the employment of slaves.” Freedom of the soil, Smith insisted to abolitionist Beriah Green in 1849, was therefore “the great basis reform,” one which would pave the way for all others, including antislavery.10

Smith soon embraced land reform with the fervor of the convert. In a letter to land reformer J.K. Ingalls, Smith conceded that “Land-Monopoly,” considered overall, was “a far more abundant source of suffering and debasement, than is Slavery.”11 “Abolish Slavery to- morrow,” Smith wrote, “and Land Monopoly would pave the way for its re-establishment. But abolish Land Monopoly—make every American citizen the owner of a farm adequate to his necessity—and there will be no room for the return of slavery.”12 But while Smith now professed to believe that “to abolish land-monopoly is to abolish chattel-slavery,” he did not insist, like some land reformers, that the former be a precondition for the latter. Neither did he abandon his commitments to immediate abolitionism and the promotion of racial equality. As National

Reformer Thomas Devyr complained, although Smith now acknowledged that land reform and antislavery were compatible, “you devote to the latter one hundred times more of your resources and your talents than you do to the former.”13

10 “Gerrit Smith on Land Monopoly,” letter dated 17 July 1847, initially published in the Christian Recorder, in National Reform Almanac for 1848 (New York: 1848), 3 (pages numbered non-consecutively); Smith to Beriah Green, Peterboro, 4 April 1849. 11 Smith to J.K. Ingalls, Peterboro, 15 August 1848. 12 “Letter of Gerrit Smith,” [from Young America], Voice of Industry, 20 November 1846; Smith to J.K. Ingalls, 15 August 1848. 13 Quoted in Amy Godine, “The Abolitionist and the Land Reformer: Gerrit Smith and Tom Devyr,” Hudson River Valley Review (Spring 2014): 31. Jamie Bronstein suggests that Smith was “romanced” by land reformers away from abolitionism and that his support for land reform was “short-lived.” However, there is little evidence to suggest that his support for land reform detracted from Smith’s commitment to antislavery, and his later support for Homestead measures as a Congressman suggest that his advocacy of land reform transcended his relatively brief association with National Reform between 1844 and 1852.

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Devyr’s complaint notwithstanding, Smith put his newfound land reform principles into practice almost immediately. For the time being, Smith resisted overtures from Evans, then hosting the National Reform Convention in New York, to accept a National Reform nomination for the state legislature, citing his inexperience in holding public office.14 But he urged James G.

Birney and other leaders of the Liberty Party to adopt land reform as part of a broader party platform that could strategically target landless small farmers in upstate Anti-rent counties and urban workingmen in the metropolis and in the industrializing canal cities. Addressing abolitionists in the Christian Recorder, Smith pressed them to consider “the friends of the slave” should not also be “the open, active, enemies of Land Monopoly?” In the meantime, he advised

Evans to choose candidates “of true benevolence,” who would direct their efforts towards securing gains for both abolitionists and land reformers.15

Cognizant of the appeal land reform measures would hold for the landless farmers that inhabited the impoverished counties that surrounded Smith’s home in the Adirondacks, he moved quickly to identify the Liberty Party as the party that best represented the interests of downtrodden whites as well as those of enslaved and free blacks. The Liberty Party, Smith wrote to voters in nearby Madison County, was “the Poor Man’s Party... organized for the sole purpose of restoring their rights to the poorest of the poor.” It was both irrational and misguided, Smith insinuated, for poor whites to give their votes to proslavery parties; if those parties had seen fit to strip propertyless blacks of the suffrage, what was to prevent them from doing the same to poor

14 Smith to George H. Evans, Peterboro, 27 August 1846; “Gerrit Smith and the Presidency,” Albany Patriot, 8 May 1847, in Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University. Smith would cite similar reasons in spurning the Macedon Convention’s nomination for President the following year, although this did not prevent him from including a list of measures, including land reform, that he would take if he did become President. 15 Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1980), 66, 71, 117–19; Smith to James G. Birney, 18 April 1846; Emancipator, 23 August 1847; “Gerrit Smith on Land Monopoly,” letter dated July 17, 1847, initially published in the Christian Recorder, in National Reform Almanac for 1848 (New York: 1848), 3 (pages numbered non-consecutively); Smith to Evans, 27 August 1846, GS Papers.

205 whites? All true “Friends of Political Reform,” those who would liberate the slave as well as those who “would have the landless poor share in the soil,” should attend the local Liberty Party conventions scheduled for New Years’ Day, 1848.16 That year, Smith engaged National

Reformer J.K. Ingalls to speak as a paid lecturer at anti-slavery public meetings in Madison,

Cayuga, and Herkimer counties in Smith’s upstate heartland, where Ingalls expounded on the virtues of combining antislavery and land reform. Among Ingalls’ audiences were the members of a “colored congregation” in Little Falls, New York, who heard Ingalls wax eloquent on the subject of “land and freedom.”17 The Associationist and abolitionist Elizur Wright urged Smith to take advantage of the insurrectionary atmosphere created by the 1848 Revolutions in Europe by speaking at Boston’s Tremont Temple, where “you can then preach Land Reform... to the best possible effect.” Smith, Wright believed, could accomplish more for the antislavery cause in an hour than other speakers could in a week.18

Not everyone, of course, was impressed with the new direction adopted by Smith and the

Liberty Leaguers. Smith suffered condemnation and abuse from Garrisonians who now branded him an apostate, and many Liberty Party figures similarly resisted the move away from the “one idea” of abolition. “I dispise [sic] the craven spirit of that man who will not vote the fetters of the slave off unless he can at the same time ‘vote himself a farm’!” fumed one Liberty Party editor, invoking the slogan of National Reform. Smith’s embrace of land reform and other Liberty

League measures with seemingly little direct relevance to slavery has similarly led historians to

16 “The Poor Man’s Party,” Gerrit Smith to “the poor men of the County of Madison,” Peterboro, 17 October 1846; “To the Friends of Political Reform, in the County of Madison,” Dec 10, 1847, GS Papers. 17 Joshua King Ingalls, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform (Elmira, New York: Gazette Company, 1897), 28–35. Although Smith declined to fund Ingalls’ land reform paper, the Landmark, he paid him twenty dollars for his expenses as a travelling lecturer, and later contributed five hundred dollars towards the establishment of a new paper, the Land Reformer, which supported Smith’s 1858 gubernatorial campaign. 18 Elizur Wright, Jr. to Gerrit Smith, 18 February 1848, 7 April 1848, GS Papers.

206 describe him as “eccentric” or “unpredictable.”19 But his positions become more explicable when examined in the light of Smith’s broader political outlook. Smith’s politics, forged on the distant frontier of the Adirondacks and on the fringes of the Market Revolution, were essentially

Jeffersonian. He professed to believe in a literal reading of the Declaration’s “all men are created equal,” and he clung to the classical liberal definition of “free trade”—which to Smith meant low tariffs and the equitable exchange of goods produced by free, rather than enslaved, labor—to the end of his life. Like several of the other prime movers in the Liberty League faction, including

Chase and Bailey, Smith leaned heavily Democratic on economic issues. Throughout the 1840s and 50s, he advocated policies that would likely have gotten him branded as a “Locofoco” a decade earlier, including support for land reform and for Van Buren’s Independent Treasury plan.20

More unusually perhaps, Smith combined his Democratic predilections with a firm and immovable conviction in an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution. First developed in the

1830s by Libertymen like Alvan Stewart, , and William Goodell—and, perhaps even earlier, by free labor advocates like George Henry Evans—the notion of the

Constitution as an essentially antislavery document became an article of faith for Smith, who sometimes pushed his interpretation to untenable extremes.21 Whereas Liberty Leaguers like

Goodell and Chase used a more moderate version of antislavery constitutionalism to develop the

19 Westley Bailey to GS, 5 June 1847, Smith Papers, quoted in Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 120; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 117. 20 See, for example, Smith to William H. Seward, 1 January 1843; “To the Liberty Party,” 7 May 1846, GS Papers. Writing to George Henry Evans in 1844, Smith had quoted William Leggett. 21 Gerrit Smith’s Constitutional Argument (Jackson & Chaplin, 1844), Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 136. Although it is tempting to speculate that Evans’ antislavery constitutionalism (described in a series of articles responding to the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831 but rarely if ever revisited) might have influenced, or at least served as a common ground between, Smith or other Liberty Party leaders, the research for this dissertation has uncovered no direct connection. Evans’ antislavery reading of the Constitution, described in Chapter 3, suggests an intriguing but ultimately unverifiable point of connection between the two men.

207 theory of denationalization or the “divorce” of the federal government from slavery, such an approach was anathema to the uncompromising Smith, who held that the Constitution made slavery “illegal” and that slaveholders should be treated as “pirates.”

Ultimately, this meant that Smith’s version of political antislavery would be highly selective and subject to litmus tests that all but the most pro-abolition and racially egalitarian candidates would fail. Hence Smith’s refusal to endorse the nomination of Independent

Democrat John Hale for the Liberty Party in 1847 or vote for the Free Soil candidate Martin Van

Buren in 1848. “Surely it must be justifiable,” Evans pleaded, to vote for moderately antislavery men who had pledged to support land reform, even if “such men may not be up to our model on other matters of minor consequence.”22 But as Smith wrote J.K. Ingalls on his refusal to support the Free Soilers, although he believed that Van Buren would “bravely resist” the further encroachments of the Slave Power, “I can vote for no man for President of the United States, who is not an abolitionist; for no man, who votes for slaveholders... whose understanding and heart would not prompt him to use the office, to the utmost, for the abolition of slavery.” Even as

Smith’s embrace of land reform and other causes entailed a broadening of the antislavery coalition away from the “one idea,” his rigorous and uncompromising criteria for candidates and parties meant that Smith’s personal involvement in such a movement would be inevitably circumscribed.23

22 Evans to Smith, Granville, NJ, 17 January 1850, GS Papers. Evans’ casual dismissal of abolition seems shocking given his longstanding support for antislavery, documented throughout this dissertation. Whether or not this comment is revealing of Evans’ true views on antislavery or merely additional evidence of Evans’ all-consuming focus on land reform will be left to the reader to decide, but it should be pointed out that the comment was made in the context of a longer statement in which Evans professed to believe that the eradication of chattel slavery was “at present... impossible.” 23 Smith to J.K. Ingalls, 15 August 1848. See also “Letter of Gerrit Smith to the Liberty Party of New-Hampshire,” March 18, 1848; “Address. To the voters of the United States” (Circular letter to Samuel Lewis, 15 July 1851), GS Papers. Smith’s commitment to land monopoly is also underscored in the letter; he pledged himself not to vote for any candidate who did not endorse land reform measures. Also striking is his devotion to racial equality; “no man is fit for President,” Smith wrote, “whose heart has not welcomed the doctrine of the human brotherhood, and the doctrine of the perfect equality of all men, in both their political and social rights. He, who would rob colored persons of the right of suffrage, or make their complexion a bar to the equality of their rights with white persons, in the school, or the house of worship, or elsewhere, is not worthy to be a civil ruler.” 208

Nonetheless, Smith did attempt to implement a pragmatic program that applied land reform principles to abolitionist ends. His famous giveaway of some 120,000 acres of his vast upstate landholdings to black New Yorkers stands as one of the period’s most ambitious efforts aimed at resettling free African Americans on lands intentionally set aside for the purpose of combating both slavery and discrimination.24 Drawing on his contacts in New York’s free black community, Smith appointed Presbyterian minister and New York City Vigilance Committee president Theodore S. Wright; Colored American publisher, clergyman, and Liberty Party secretary Charles B. Ray; and the distinguished doctor James McCune Smith as trustees of the plan, in charge of selecting some 3,000 African American recipients to be given grants of between forty and sixty acres of land in Franklin, Essex, Hamilton, Fulton, Oneida, Delaware,

Madison, and Ulster counties in Upstate New York.25

While certainly admirable, such a criteria would have effectively ruled out all but a handful of white and black abolitionists as candidates for the presidency. In 1847, Niles’ National Register reprinted a list of Smith’s principles and criteria for officeholders. Among the former were the abolition of the army, navy, customs officials and other restrictions of free trade as well as the practice of selling the public lands; among the latter, Smith supported barring from holding office not only slaveholders but any politician who did not support extending the suffrage to African Americans, as well as “liquor traffickers” and members of secret societies. Niles’ National Register, 10 July 1847, 297. 24 These efforts ranged from the never-realized plan of Benjamin Lundy to resettle blacks in Texas or Mexico, to Frances Wright’s failed experiment at Nashoba (described in Chapter Two), to the settlements, organized by both free blacks and white abolitionists, of Wilberforce, Dawn, and Elgin in Canada West. In the latter community, often viewed as the longest-lasting and most successful, settlers were required to purchase the lands on which they settled via an extended payment plan. Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney attempted to revive a plan for resettling former slaves in Mexico in 1840, and the Indiana and Ohio legislatures passed resolutions in 1848 and 1849 to resettle blacks in unspecified locations in the Mexican Cession. Smith’s effort, however, remains unique in its approach (although strictly voluntary, it sought prospective candidates for individual land grants, as opposed to the organized settlements formed by refugees and migrants), and its inspiration by, if not strict adherence to, land reform principles. Much work remains to be done on this understudied aspect of abolitionism and antebellum free black life. Evans’ role in inspiring the land grants remains open to debate. But although he told Evans that he had “cherished for years” the idea of such a giveaway, the timing of the giveaway and the fact that Smith began to take steps to pay off the debt on his landholdings and make other arrangements beginning immediately after their correspondence suggests that Evans’ initial challenge played some role in prompting the decision. See Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 138–39. 25 [Gerrit Smith, Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith], An Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens of New-York, Who Are the Owners of One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Acres of Land... (New York, 1846). Smith had a long-standing correspondence and friendship with McCune Smith; see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men. Smith’s relationship with Wright and Ray may have stemmed from his involvement with the New York City Vigilance Committee. Around 1850, Smith became president of the newly-formed New York State Committee, on which Ray served as corresponding secretary; he also served as secretary at the Liberty Party convention in Buffalo in 1843. See Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 101; M.N. Work, “The Life of Charles B. Ray,” Journal of Negro History 4, No. 4 (October, 1919), 361–71.

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It is tempting to speculate that Smith envisioned these tracts of land to become the nucleus of an autonomous, self-sufficient black community in the Adirondacks, as some scholars have described the settlements that formed at North Elba (known as “Timbucto”) and Upper

Florence. Smith had entertained and expressed an interest in the ideas of the perfectionist reformer John Humphrey Noyes, whose Oneida community was only about twenty miles from

Peterboro. But although Smith occasionally referred to the formation of a “colored colony” in the

Adirondacks—and although free blacks themselves seem to have occasionally viewed the settlements in those terms—the grants he distributed were spread out among several counties in what was (and remains) largely a wilderness, with tracts often located miles apart from one another. Furthermore, Smith tended to describe his hopes for the settlers in the language of religious benevolence and rugged individualism rather than communitarianism or radical agrarianism: “On these tracts of land they will begin a new life,” he told Wright, Ray, and

McCune Smith. “There they will brave the rigors of the wilderness, and make for themselves a hardy and honorable character.”26

The response from free black leaders to Smith’s plan, moreover, suggests not only that many not only saw Smith’s land distribution scheme as both viable and motivated by sincere intentions, but that at least some free African Americans in the North viewed the underlying and interconnected issues of labor, land ownership, economic change, and independence in terms similar to their white working-class counterparts. Amos Berman, a black clergyman in New

Haven, Connecticut, took note of “the fever in this city among the colored people... to procure

26 Smith to Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith, Peterboro, 14 November 1846, GS Papers. Even in the so-called African-American “colony” of Timbucto, made famous by , only about twenty or thirty families, or one hundred people, settled in the area. See Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 157. For Smith’s references to a “colored colony,” see previous as well as Smith to General John H. Cooke, 11 December 1840, GS Papers. On the relationship between Smith and Noyes, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men 130-33, George Wallingford Noyes, ed., Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes, Founder of the Oneida Community (New York: Macmillan Company, 1923), 330-31. See also Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, 171–72, n61; also Smith’s correspondence with Noyes and Robert Dale Owen, as well as material on the “Modern Times” community in GS Papers.

210 homesteads” after news of Smith’s announcement reached town.27 The three trustees in charge of identifying potential recipients were even more enthusiastic. No similar scheme, Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith wrote, had been “more full of hope to our down trodden portion of the human race... because, no event has given us so near an approach to the full exercise of the faculties with which God has endowed us in common with all men.” Although they tended to couch their free soil and free labor rhetoric in the language of Protestant moral uplift, these

African-American religious and community leaders, too, spoke of the inherent dignity of labor and viewed possession of the soil as the key to independence. It was “labour, the ‘common destiny of the American people,’” Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith wrote, that “makes all equal.”28

Free African Americans in the period, barred from the skilled trades and from most trades unions by discrimination, found other ways to organize their industry. Sometime around 1855,

Freeman Murrow, a free black inventor in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, founded the joint-stock Brooklyn Brush Manufacturing Company to manufacture and sell Murrow’s patented adjustable brush for painting and whitewashing. The Company’s published “Rules of

Association” mixed the language of self-help and racial uplift with demands for recognition of civil and political equality and a strain of producerist free labor rhetoric. After a lengthy preamble that noted that the United States Constitution did not distinguish among “class, sect, or complexion,” the company’s founders declared that its purpose to be “that we may be supported in the enjoyment of mechanical arts, productive labor, establishing and operating workshops for ourselves and our children... and that by means of productive labor... we may cultivate,

27 North Star, 2 March 1849; quoted in Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 142. 28 Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith, in An Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens of New-York, Who Are the Owners of One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Acres of Land... (New York, 1846), 10.

211 strengthen and employ our inventive genius, as authors and producers, equally with other men.”

A poem on the reverse, entitled “Tornado: For a Warfare of Civil Rights and Not Bloodshed,” extolled the virtues of “union” and described “the hammer, plane, and saw” as “the implements of Freedom.”29

In some ways, the similarity of statements like these to the free-labor pronouncements made by white workers in the period should not be surprising. The experience of enslaved workers and those free black leaders who comprised a relative elite within the African American communities of the North had alike been forged in the crucible of labor. McCune Smith’s acquisition of a medical degree, which he had obtained against all odds by studying in Scotland, was surely exceptional; more typical was Ray, who had labored as a blacksmith before becoming the editor of the Colored American newspaper and the founder of the Bethesda Congregational

Church. Henry Highland Garnet’s father, an escaped slave from Maryland, had toiled as a shoemaker in New York, while James W. C. Pennington pointedly titled his autobiography Diary of a Fugitive Blacksmith.

Elsewhere, McCune Smith complained that, in addition to facing discrimination from employers and journeymen in seeking “mechanical employment,” “the enormous combination of capital, which is slowly invading every calling in the city... must tend more and more to grind the face of the poor in the cities, and render them more and more the slaves of lower wages and higher rents.”30 In a published “Address to the Three Thousand,” the presumptive recipients of

Smith’s land grants, McCune Smith and his fellow land-grant trustees spoke in terms nearly

29 Rules of Association of the Brooklyn Brush Manufacturing Company (New-York: William S Dorr, 1855). The poem also contained Masonic imagery, probably indicative of Murrow and/or other founder’s involvement in Prince Hall Masonry. On the role of Freemasonry in free black communities in the antebellum period, see Craig Steven Wilder, In the Company of Black Men. 30 McCune Smith, (Report of the Committee on the Social Condition of the Colored Race), in the New-York Tribune, 20 March 1851; quoted in Commons, ed. Documentary History VIII:2, 97.

212 identical to those used by labor leaders and land reformers, lamenting the fluctuations in the remuneration and availability of wage labor that were functions of its increasing dependence on market forces of supply and demand. The key difference was that for these black leaders, landed independence was the key to escaping both market pressures and discrimination from whites:

Too long have American usages and American caste consigned us to dependent employments at reduced wages,—to fortuitous labour, embracing but a portion of the year—thus creating that feeling of dependence and uncertainty, which ever crushes the energies and deadens the faculties of men. Now, however, once in possession of, once upon our own land, we will be our own masters, free to think, free to act; and, if we toil hard, that toil will be sweetened by the reflection, that it is all, by God’s will and help, for ourselves, our wives and our children. Thus placed in an independent condition, we will not only be independent, in ourselves, but will overcome that prejudice against condition, which has so long been as a mill stone about our necks.31

Evidently, white workers and labor reformers were not unique in identifying “free labor” as something encompassing more than the mere freedom to compete in the market for wages.

Noting in their letter to Smith that “nearly all of your plots lie in clusters, or adjacent parcels,”

Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith envisioned a self-sufficient community in terms that in some ways recalled the cooperative communities of the Owenites or Associationists. “MUTUAL-

RELIANCE must accompany self-reliance,” they wrote, “there must be mutual assistance, mutual and equal dependence, mutual sympathy.” Moreover, “SYSTEM” was “most important...

Mutual system, thoroughly arranged, and rigidly adhered to will accomplish infinitely more than

31 Wright et al., Address to the Three Thousand, 10.

213 separate labour, and will bring out all the advantages, profits, pleasures, and advancement, which are beginning to dawn upon ORGANIZED INDUSTRY.”32

Frederick Douglass, another of Smith’s correspondents and soon to become an important ally, insisted on “property in man” as the sina qua non of slavery and railed against white labor reformers who uncritically used the comparisons implicit in terms like “wage slavery” and

“white slavery” to press their case.33 But Douglass was also capable, in nearly the same breath, of describing slavery in free-labor terms as “that relation by which one man, without contract, without compensation, without consultation with the individual, reduces him to the condition of a beast of burthen.” At other times, he was effusive in his praise of the free labor system of the

North, favorably contrasting his experience as a manual laborer in New Bedford with his experience as a skilled, but enslaved, ship-caulker in Baltimore and recalling with obvious relish the experience of earning wages. Just as Garrison had been swayed by his visceral encounters with impoverished wage workers in Britain and his fellowship with abolitionist labor radicals like John A. Collins, Douglass may have been influenced by James Needham Buffum, who accompanied him on a lecture tour of Britain in 1845–46. Buffum was a Quaker Fourierist and vice president of the “Friends of Social Reform” in Essex County, Massachusetts, and later headed the Laborers Homestead and Southern Emigration Society, an organization that purchased land in Reconstruction-era Virginia for resale to freedmen. But the biggest change

32 Ibid., 10–13; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 855. 33 Douglass, “Slavery, the Free Church, and British Agitation against Bondage: An Address Delivered in Newcastle- upon-Tyne, England, on 3 August 1846,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches Debates, and Interviews Vol. 1: 1841-46 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979); North Star, January 7, December 15, 1848. In response to the Salem, Ohio Homestead Journal, Douglass complained that “For any man to talk about white slavery in this country in connection with black slavery, is to use words deceitfully,” but promised to “examine” the land reform movement and speak about it after formulating an informed opinion. North Star, January 7, 1848. See the North Star, December 15, 1848 on the controversy that stemmed from Douglass’s review of speeches by land reformers George Bradburn of the Lynn Pioneer and J.K. Ingalls of the Landmark at an American Anti-Slavery Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. In defending himself and Ingalls in an article from the Pioneer reprinted in the North Star, Bradburn mounted a nuanced defense of the “wage slavery” thesis, and the debate was waged in mutually respectful terms, with Douglass concluding that “we are unable to see the distinction here attempted, and must wait for more light.” North Star, December 15, 1848.

214 came after Douglass adopted political antislavery, a conversion facilitated in part by Smith. Both

Douglass and Henry Bibb addressed the Free Soil Convention at Buffalo in 1848, and the

National Colored Convention at Cleveland endorsed the Free Soilers that year. Thereafter he supported the Liberty Party, inspired and convinced by the antislavery constitutionalism developed by William Goodell, Lysander Spooner, Gerrit Smith, and others.34

Even as he pushed the Libertymen, and their successors, the Free Democratic Party, to incorporate anti-discrimination measures into their platform, Douglass increasingly encountered the pro-land reform and pro-labor stances adopted by Smith and many others in the party. In the spring of 1851, Douglass began to take steps to merge the North Star, now in financial difficulties after prominent Garrisonians had withdrawn support, with the Liberty Party Paper, edited by Syracuse Libertyman and land reform supporter John Thomas. Initial funding for the new venture, emblazoned with the motto “All rights for All,” was supported by Smith. As

Corresponding Editor, Thomas used the columns of Frederick Douglass’s Paper to champion the Free Democratic Party, the exiled Hungarian independence leader Louis Kossuth, and land reform, which he described the most “interesting” subject then before the people. Douglass’s sometime-rival Samuel Ringgold Ward, who nonetheless contemplated merging his Citizen with

Frederick Douglass’s Paper and served as a correspondent, was something of an advocate for labor himself, blaming “monopoly” for the fact that “the poor mechanic and the laboring classes in almost every part of the country are becoming more and more depressed.” Douglass remained personally aloof from the efforts of land reformers, but he compared land reform favorably to colonization or emigration schemes before an antislavery audience in 1851, declaring that “the

34 Douglass, “Slavery, the Free Church, and British Agitation against Bondage: An Address Delivered in Newcastle- upon-Tyne, England, on 3 August 1846,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches Debates, and Interviews Vol. 1: 1841-46 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ Press, 1979); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 468, 482. Buffum’s career is briefly described in Blassingame, Vol. 1, 38 n1.

215

Land-Reform project, with its aim to elevate labor; to ameliorate the condition of the poor, to give homes to the homeless; and land to the landless,” had “engaged some of the noblest heads, and most philanthropic hearts of this age.” After breaking with the AASS that same year,

Douglass soon found himself ostracized by the Garrisonians, complaining in a letter to Smith that critics at the Society’s annual convention in 1852 had stood “seven deep” against him for his paper’s support of the Liberty Party and land reform.35

Broader support among African Americans for the agrarian and free labor ideals that undergirded the land reform movement can be gauged by comments and resolutions passed at the

National Colored Conventions held between 1847 and 1851. Held annually between the 1830s and 1860s (and later revived after the war), the Colored Conventions brought together African

American leaders from throughout the North and functioned as a key site of free black political organizing and antislavery activism. Although the Colored Conventions were organized and directed principally by the abolitionist free-black elite, such as Douglass, Bibb, Ray, and Martin

L. Delany, a self-imposed inquiry into the occupational make-up of the 1848 Convention found that its membership was composed overwhelmingly of skilled tradesmen, including “Printers,

Carpenters, Blacksmiths, Shoemakers... Gunsmiths... Tailors... Wheelwrights, Painters,

Farmers... Plasterers, Masons... Laborers, [and] Coopers.”36 At the 1851 Convention, a

Committee on Agriculture, headed by Charles B. Ray and Willis Hodges, thanked Smith for his

“beneficent act” and went on to expound on the virtues of agrarian living. “An Agricultural life,” the Committee believed, “also tends to equality... by placing men in the same position in

35 Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 1 April 1852; Ward quoted in Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 468; “Persecution on Account of Faith, Persecution on Account of Color: An Address Delivered in Rochester, NewYork, on 26 January 1851” (published in the North Star, 30 January 1851); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 492–96; Frederick Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 15 May 1852, in Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers I, 536-37. 36 Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, On Wednesday, September 6, 1848 (Rochester: John Dick, at the North Star Office, 1848), 12–15, 17–30.

216 society... all castes fade away... and an equality of rights, interests and privileges only exist [sic].

An Agricultural life then is the life for a proscribed class to pursue, because it tends to break down all proscriptions.” Resolutions passed by the Committee and signed by Frederick Douglass recommended that “our people... forsake the cities and their employments of dependency therein, and emigrate to those parts of the country where land is cheap, and become cultivators of the soil, as the surest road to respectability and influence.”37 The following year’s National

Convention, in addition to passing resolutions endorsing the , urged African

Americans to follow both agricultural and mechanical pursuits. Blacks should become “tillers of the soil,” the Convention’s “Address to the Colored People of the United States” urged its hearers, since “our cities are overrun with menial laborers.” The “Address,” signed by a committee that included Douglass and Henry Bibb, also recommended that free blacks “try to get your sons into mechanical trades,” since “every blow of the sledge-hammer, wielded by a sable arm, is a powerful blow in support of our cause. Every colored mechanic... [is] an elevator of his race.” Other state and national Colored Conventions in the period recommended the formation of

Protective Unions, manual labor and “industrial” schools, and the formation of organized communities of black farmers in Canada or elsewhere outside the United States.38

If Smith’s land-grant plan was novel in its ambition and in the scope of its philanthropy, then, its underlying ideas were nothing new. Both black and white abolitionists attempted to put free-labor and communitarian principles into practice in communities organized by and for former slaves throughout the period. In 1829, free blacks in Cincinnati, faced with the prospect

37 “Report of the Committee on Agriculture,” Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored People and Their Friends; Held in Troy, N.Y., on the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th of October, 1847 (Troy, NY, 1847), 29–30. 38 “State Council of the Colored People of Massachusetts, Convention January 2, 1854,” Meeting of the [Massachusetts] State Council, in Behalf of Colored Americans, accessed via Colored Conventions.org,”coloredconventions.org/items/show/263; accessed March 27, 2015. See especially the resolutions of Charles L. Reason and H. O. Remington.

217 of the resurrection of Ohio’s discriminatory Black Codes and mob attacks on black homes (both carried out at least partially at the behest of white laborers who were motivated by resentment of economic competition), purchased 4,000 acres of land in western from the Canada

Company in the hopes of establishing a self-sufficient community. They were led by James C.

Brown, a free black mason by trade who had earlier traveled to Texas on behalf of Benjamin

Lundy. In Cincinnati, Brown recalled, he had become “an object of jealousy to white mechanics, because I was more successful in getting jobs.” Brown organized a “Colonization Society” that ultimately led several hundred black Cincinnatians, later joined by a group of fifteen families from Boston, to settle in a semi-organized community near Biddulph township, christened

Wilberforce. Dependent on white abolitionists for funded, the community foundered by 1836, and Brown returned to Cincinnati. But he returned to Canada in the late 1840s, settling first in

Dawn, a settlement organized by white abolitionists but spearheaded largely by the black preacher Josiah Henson, and then in Chatham, near the Elgin community, a free labor experiment organized by the white Methodist and former slaveowner Reverend William King.

The numbers of former slaves and free blacks swelled after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850—some estimates have speculated that as many as 40,000 American blacks fled to

Canada in the decades before the Civil War—facilitated by organizations like the Refugee Home

Society, which employed black abolitionists Henry Bibb and George DeBaptiste as fundraisers.

Although overwhelmingly agricultural in conception, all of the major settlements of free black refugees in Canada combined agriculture with some form of light industry; Dawn had a sawmill and ropewalk, and Elgin had a brickyard, a saw and grist mill, and produced barrel staves. If the

Canadian free black communities were seldom, if ever, characterized by intentionally communal or cooperative labor arrangements, they generally featured “manual labor” or “industrial”

218 schools, like Dawn’s British-American Institute, the result of efforts by black and white abolitionists from the 1830s on to combine their belief in the inherent dignity and moral value of physical labor with practical training in skilled trades 39

Unlike Smith’s land-grant plan, which offered free donations of land to anyone willing to work them and pay taxes, the Elgin community, the longest-lived and most successful of the

Canadian free black commmunities, required settlers to purchase the land on which they settled.40

Although the grants included in Smith’s plan were sometimes separated by many miles in distance, the scheme was far larger in scope, entailing the distribution, in theory, of perhaps

350,000 acres of land. Smith’s free-land experiment was unique, however, in another sense: in its attempt at racial egalitarianism. Surprisingly, most scholars who have focused on Smith’s land grants to African Americans have overlooked the fact that he made nearly identical arrangements to give away gifts of free land to impoverished whites. Initially, Smith’s land grant scheme had been restricted to black New Yorkers, since, as Smith noted, they represented “the poorest of the poor, and the most deeply wronged class of our citizens.” But several years later, perhaps prodded by his newfound friendship with Evans and now financially unburdened by the payment of his once-substantial debts, Smith revisited the issue with an eye towards distributing land to poor whites. Beginning in 1849, Smith proposed distributing land grants to poor white recipients,

39 William H. Pease and Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963); Brown quoted in Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves, Related By Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1856), 239–248; Nikki Marie Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005); William King, Manuscript Autobiography, Public Archives Records Center, Canada, 1846–1916 (available at Yale University Beinecke Library); Peter Ripley, e.d, The Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 332; “British American Institute,” National Era, November 18, 1847; “Dawn Institute, Canada West,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper, December 31, 1852. These organizations were not immune to controversy; Josiah Henson, alleged to be the model for Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, was accused of embezzling funds, while Samuel Ringgold Ward, Mary Shadd Cary and others took Henry Bibb to task for his fundraising activities on behalf of the Refugee Home Society. See the coverage provided by several newspapers published by blacks in Canada, particularly the Provincial Freeman, edited by Mary Shadd Cary. 40 Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, 86–90. In an approach that mirrored some of the Fourierist communities, Rev. King formed a joint-stock company, the Elgin Association, to purchase and resell land on a modified installment plan.

219 including some 150 in New York City, to be selected by a committee that included George

Henry Evans.41 Relying on the contacts he had cultivated through his antislavery, land reform, and Liberty Party connections, Smith sought to select 1,000 poor New Yorkers—500 men and

500 women—to receive the grants. His conditions specified that the recipients be white residents between the ages of 21 and 60; in addition to being “virtuous, landless, and poor,” they must be

“entirely clear of the vice of drinking intoxicating liquors.”42

The separate-but-equal approach may seem an odd choice for a professed racial egalitarian, but as Smith made clear, his decision stemmed from an inner conflict between his appreciation of the special circumstances which hobbled free blacks and a desire to alleviate the poverty that affected New Yorkers regardless of race. Writing to McCune Smith and the other

African-American trustees in New York, Smith recalled that “to whom among the poor I shall make these Deeds, is a question I did not solve hastily... for a long time, I was at a loss to decide, whether to take my beneficiaries from the meritorious poor generally, or from the meritorious colored poor only.” Smith’s brand of racial egalitarianism led him ultimately to conclude that “I could not put a bounty on color. I shrunk from the least appearance of doing so...” Lest he be accused of discrimination, a “Circular” announcing the new plan reiterated that Smith had

41 “Circular,” Gerrit Smith to Unknown, Peterboro, 1 May 1849; Gerrit Smith to John Cochran, Isaac T. Hopper, Daniel C. Eaton, George H. Evans, and William Kemeys, Peterboro, 4 January 1850, GS Papers. 42 In his “Circular,” Smith made clear that his specification that the recipients in this case be white was predicated on the fact that he had already made allowances for the distribution of 3,000 grants to African Americans. Temperance was a major issue for Smith, as it was for most abolitionists and many labor reformers. In a letter to Evans, Smith cancelled Evan’s debt of $227.63, but only after scolding him for the use of “intoxicating liquor.” Smith to Evans, 2 December 1846, GS Papers. Aside from the obvious factor of race, these criteria were identical to the ones Smith had specified for black recipients, with the exception that the requirement of total abstinence from alcohol was imposed for whites. Smith had earlier required only that black grantees not be “drunkards,” explaining in his letter to Theodore Wright et al. (later published as the “Address to the Three Thousand”) that “I had almost added of no person, who drinks intoxicating liquor—since to drink it, though ever so moderately, is to be in the way to drunkenness.” Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith insisted on total abstinence for recipients anyway. Smith later changed his mind about giving land to women, substituting cash payments instead. In the letter to Evans et al., above, he cited as a reason for this decision the fact that his remaining land was largely unfit for farming, since “my gifts to colored people took all my large tracts of farming land, save one in the County of Franklin.”

220 already given away to African-American beneficiaries three times the amount of land he now proposed giving to deserving whites.43

Smith’s insistence that grantees be “meritorious” and forswear any use of alcohol was typical of the middle-class reformism of his day, which insisted that charity be reserved for the

“deserving” poor. But if Smith’s land grant plan in some ways reflected the middle-class

Protestant values of self-reliance and moral purity, its underlying principles were genuinely radical. “I am an Agrarian,” Smith informed Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith. “I would, that every man, who desires a farm, should have one; and I would, that no man were so regardless of the needs of his brother men, as to covet the possession of more farms than one.”44 Although he claimed to deplore the brand of “lawless, violent and bloody Agrarianism” with which such schemes had previously been associated in the public mind, the dispersal of his landholdings to the deserving poor was an idea that he had “indulged in” for “years.” Moreover, Smith’s plan was predicated on a radical understanding of economic equality, and of the very meaning of equality in a democratic nation, that challenged the “go-ahead,” get-rich-quick notions of a free market society busily engaged in what later referred to as the “race of life.” As

Smith wrote to George Henry Evans, his vision of the ideal society was one in which “no man be rich, and no man be poor—that no man be overworked, and no man be underworked.”45 Despite

Smith’s own patrician background and his ideological commitment to laissez-faire free trade, he was far more willing than most exponents of “free labor” to extend the egalitarian principles that undergirded his reformist vision to their logical extremes.

43 “Circular,” Gerrit Smith to Unknown, Peterboro, 1 May 1849. 44 Smith to George H. Evans, Peterboro, 27 August 1846; Smith to Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith, Peterboro, 1 August 1846, GS Papers. 45 Smith to Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith, Peterboro, 1 August 1846; Lincoln, “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair”; Smith to Evans, August 26 1846, GS Papers.

221

Smith’s conservative and proslavery adversaries pounced on Smith’s land plan as evidence of delusionary thinking (a precedent perhaps unconsciously followed by several of

Smith’s later chroniclers). The proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh denounced Smith’s “plan of agrarianism” for its attack upon the “vested rights” of private property, the justification for which Fitzhugh linked to William H. Seward’s antislavery appeal to a “higher law,” and after evidence emerged of Smith’s complicity in John Brown’s raid, southern newspapers hit upon the land scheme as evidence of Smith’s “insanity.”46 In New York, the proslavery Herald ridiculed a meeting of Smith land donees that it claimed was attended by only two members, from which the conservative New York Express drew the conclusion that “it is evident from this that the

Workingmen of New-York do not desire to leave the City except on occasional excursions.” But

National Reformer E. S. Manning, fresh from a discussion of the Smith lands at the Industrial

Congress that summer, refuted such claims in a letter to the New-York Tribune. Manning insisted that “the greater part” of the grant recipients had paid taxes and had their deeds recorded, and reported that a delegate sent to examine the land had reported back favorably, and the report unanimously adopted at a meeting of land reformers. The Smith land donees, Manning claimed, were “scattered from Harlem to the Battery,” and a majority were “desirous of settling upon the land,” while the remainder planned to keep the lands and pay taxes on them, in the hopes that their children might someday acquire them.47

Manning’s letter, however, also points to some of the limitations of Smith plan. As

Manning pointed out, Smith’s distribution of the land on isolated tracts, sometimes separated by large distances, entailed that settlers had to provide “more means than any one of the donees,

46 George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1857), 306–08; “Gerrit Smith’s Insanity,” Baltimore Sun, 17 November 1859; “Gerrit Smith’s Insanity,” Columbus [Ga] Ledger-Enquirer, 11 November 1859; “The Insanity of Gerrit Smith,” [Montgomery, Ala.] Daily Confederation, 16 November 1859. 47 “The Smith Lands” (E.S. Manning to the Editor of the New-York Tribune) Tribune, 19 July 1850.

222 with one or two exceptions, have in their possession.” The white workers affiliated with

Manning’s National Reform group, therefore, had concluded that the best course was to “keep united, and settle the land upon some simple principle of cooperation” as yet to be determined.

Although the number of grantees, black or white, who actually made use of their grants to settle in upstate New York remains unknown, the available evidence suggests that it was far fewer than the 4,000 gifts of land Smith made.48 Despite Frederick Douglass’s approval of the plan in the

North Star, and the publication by Ray and McCune Smith of an urgent 1854 broadside urging

African-American grantees to “Redeem your lands!!” before they lapsed into , such appeals seem to have fallen mainly on deaf ears. As Smith himself occasionally admitted, the recipients of his land faced significant obstacles: all of the land grants were in remote, wilderness areas; some of the land was of poor soil (although Smith optimistically claimed that entrepreneurial-spirited settlers could sell its timber for profit); and nearly all of the grantees, whether white or black, lacked the capital for basic provisions and start-up costs, as well as for the payment of taxes.49

Despite evidence of the existence of embryonic communities made up of African

American settlers on Smith lands at Upper Florence (near Utica) and “Timbucto” (North Elba)— the last made famous both as a pan-African-inspired, autonomous free black community as well as the base of operations for John Brown—Smith’s land-grant plan must be accounted a failure.

48 Most recently, John Stauffer calculated that, even in the African-American “colony” of Timbucto, made famous by John Brown, only about twenty or thirty families, or one hundred people, settled in the area. See Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 157. More work needs to be done to ascertain and trace the number of recipients who did settle on Gerrit Smith lands. Volume 88 in the Smith papers contains extensive records of the names of African-American land recipients, arranged by county of residence, along with coordinates of the individual land grants. Although the vast majority are unknown, the African-American recipients include a virtual “who’s who” of prominent free blacks, none of whom ever settled on the Smith lands. 49 “The Smith Lands,” North Star 8 February 1848; Charles B. Ray and James McCune Smith, Gerrit Smith Grantees, Redeem Your Lands!! (New York, 1854); Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 156–57; see Smith letters on details of land. Evans, in a letter to Smith, alluded to another obstacle for urban workers; Mary Ann Fosdick, a poor dressmaker, was willing to accept the land, but only if she could be located near a market for her wares. Evans to Gerrit Smith, Granville, NJ, 17 January 1850, GS Papers.

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Some historians have seen Smith’s land distribution scheme as motivated primarily by political considerations, both as a clever plan to circumvent New York’s racist restrictions on the suffrage by creating a critical mass of enfranchised, property-owning black voters, and in the process garner African-American votes for the Liberty Party.50 But while enfranchisement and vote- getting were undoubtedly part of the motivation for Smith’s plan, as he himself admitted, there is no reason why the politically-motivated aspect of the land grant scheme should cast doubt on the sincerity or depth of Smith’s commitment to land reform. Smith continued to support the

National Reformers, sending funds to Evans to help keep Young America afloat. During his brief term in the House of Representatives in 1853–54, Smith strove to win a hearing for the transformation of the public lands into homesteads. In January, 1854, Smith offered a series of resolutions on the Public Lands that premised the Homestead bill’s distribution of public lands into free homesteads on the principle that “the right of all persons to the soil... is as equal, as inherent, as sacred, as the right to life itself.” The resolutions were tabled, but the following month, Smith spoke in favor of the Homestead bill generated by the 33rd Congress, viewing it, despite some imperfections, as a recognition that “the public lands belong, not to the

Government, but to the landless.” Responding to slaveholding conservatives and others who saw

Homestead measures as an ominous attack on property rights, Smith did not deny that an

“absolute” right to property existed in some things, but denied that such a right existed in the land. Turning to the labor theory of property, he explained that “what a man produces from the soil, he has an absolute right to... But no such right can he have in the soil itself.”51

50 Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 139. 51 Gerrit Smith, Speeches of Gerrit Smith in Congress (New York: Mason Brothers, 1856), 41–43; 72, 75. The speech on the Homestead bill was also published separately as Homes for All: Speech of Gerrit Smith, on the Homestead Bill. In Congress, February 21, 1854 (Washington, D.C.: Buell & Blanchard, 1854). Smith funded an anti-land monopoly broadside printed by Thomas Devyr, and continued to support Evans’ Young America, although Devyr later complained that Smith later “deserted Land Reform” and cut off funds for Evans’ paper. See Devyr, Odd Book, American Section, 113–15.

224

To Smith’s chagrin, however, just before the vote on the bill, a last-minute amendment was added specifying that only white men were eligible for free homesteads. In letter to

Frederick Douglass later published in Douglass’s Paper, Smith explained his decision to vote against the bill and expressed his outrage at such a “trampling of human rights.” Although he regretted that some land reformers, “with whom I have, so long, toiled” might be aggravated by his decision, he averred that “the Homestead Bill would have been purchased at too dear a rate had it proscribed only one negro, or only one Indian.”52

Unfortunately for Smith, his efforts on behalf of both Homestead and the slave were soon overshadowed by his role in a controversy that loomed yet larger over the fate of the nation, one with severe ramifications for both for the hopes of both land reformers and abolitionists. Smith had voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but due to widespread misunderstanding about his role in the vote—the Tribune had published an article stating that Smith had voted for it, then that he had slept through the vote—he found both his “abolition character” ruined and his hopes for a peaceful resolution of the slavery question shattered, and he resigned from office on June

27th, 1854.53

In 1855, Smith predicted to Wendell Phillips that “it is but too probable... that American slavery will have expired in blood, before the men shall have arisen, who are capable of bringing it to a voluntary termination.” The actions of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry four years later would mark a fateful step towards the consummation of Smith’s dreadful prophecy, and allegations over Smith’s role in the conspiracy, combined with the events of the previous year,

52 Ibid., 93–94. 53 The misunderstanding stemmed from Smith’s refusal to take part in a procedural effort by northern antislavery congressmen to table the bill and prevent it from being voted on, an arrangement which violated Smith’s democratic sensibilities. Although the Tribune later retracted its statement, the damage had been done; the National Convention of Colored People issued a statement lamenting “the refusal of our recent ardent friend, Hon. Gerrit Smith, to serve the cause of the oppressed.” See The Controversy between New-York Tribune and Gerrit Smith (New York: John A. Gray, 1855); Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 177– 81.

225 would impel him to take temporary refuge in an asylum.54 By that time, however, Smith’s efforts to forge an alliance between land reformers and the Liberty Party—further details of which are the subject of the next chapter—had contributed to the formation of a broader and more powerful political coalition based on joining non-extension and Homestead measures to antislavery.

Despite continuing ideological and strategic conflicts between abolitionists and labor reformers,

Smith’s role as a bridge between the two groups can be surmised by the respect in which he continued to be viewed by both sides; in the midst of the fallout over Kansas-Nebraska, the

Liberator reminded readers that Smith’s “philanthropy is beyond impeachment or suspicion,” and years later National Reformer Thomas Devyr remembered him as being “of a purity of heart rarely paralleled.”55 In the meantime, political events surrounding the fate of slavery in the territories would continue to have a dramatically reshape the political calculus in the free-labor

North, considerably raising the stakes for those, like Smith, who viewed “freedom of the soil” and the right to self-ownership as complementary and mutually-reinforcing.

54 Smith to Wendell Phillips, Feb 20th, 1855. On John Brown’s embrace of “freedom of the soil,” see Stauffer, 170; John Brown, Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States (1858), available at National Archives.gov, research.archives.gov/id/3819337. 55 Liberator, October 19, 1855; Devyr, Odd Book, American Section, 113.

226

CHAPTER Seven Towards a “Union of Reformers”: National Reform, the Industrial Congress, and the Politics of “Free Labor, Free Soil”

To establish Equality, Liberty, and Brotherhood among men of every Race: to provide that the Rights of Men, alienable and inalienable, shall be more perfectly understood and guaranteed: to redeem the Industrial Classes from the condition of Inferiority which has hitherto everywhere attached to Labor: to unite in one the Friends of Humanity: to promote Intelligence, Virtue, and Happiness: this Convention, representing the various useful classes, do adopt and recommend to the People of these United States the following CONSTITUTION, as the Basis of a New Moral Government.1

So read the “Preamble” to the constitution drafted by a small group of labor reformers, abolitionists, and others who gathered in New York City in October 1845 to call for the formation of a deliberative body that they hoped would help bring about “the elevation of the

Laboring Classes...the great work of this age and this country.” The Industrial Congress, as the new organization was dubbed, aimed to bring about a “Union of Reformers” that would transcend party allegiances and even, it was hoped, attachments to what its official pronouncements labeled “fragmentary” reform movements, in favor of what the Lowell Voice of

Industry described as an “Institution for concentrating the influence of all men of all parties who are struggling in the cause of Human Rights and Universal Brotherhood.”2

If the labor papers of the period can be taken as reliable indicators of the feelings of working men and women, the formation of Industrial Congress was greeted with great

1 “Constitution of the Industrial Congress,” Young America 25 October, 1845. The constitution was drafted and approved at a preliminary Industrial Convention, held in New York City on October 14th. Young America apparently republished the constitution periodically; see 29 April, 23 September, 1848. The NIC constitution added to the Declaration’s formulation of natural rights an insistence that these included the rights to “the fruits of labor,” to the soil, to education and “paternal protection from society.” 2 “National Convention—Union of Reformers—Industrial Congress,” Young America, 4 October 1845; Voice of Industry, 11 June 1847. The “call” for the organization of the Industrial Congress was also published in the New-York Tribune, 17 September 1845; and the Harbinger I, No. 11 (23 August 1845), 169–70. See also “The Industrial Congress,” [Letter to Horace Greeley], New-York Tribune, 10 September 1845.

227 enthusiasm. “The Revolution to be fought over again!” the New England Mechanic exclaimed.

“A new Declaration of Independence! The work of ’76 to be finished! Equality and Freedom to be achieved! The right to life, and to a free soil on which to toil for life, to be acknowledged! The toiling millions emancipated, and violated rights restored to all!” In Young America, Evans rejoiced that “Anti-Renters, Associationists, and Socialists, Whigs and Democrats... shook hands over the proposition to put an end to government land-selling,” and declared, with perhaps a touch of immodesty, that the organization of the first Congress represented “more important work than... has never been performed by any similar body in the Republic.”3 Even the skeptical

Harbinger proclaimed that “nothing would give us more satisfaction” than the combination of reformers in “one grand movement, which shall have for its object the extirpation off the social causes of war, slavery, intemperance, licentiousness, and poverty... the day of our redemption draws nigh.”4 If measured against these millennial expectations, let alone against the standard of legislative or political gains for workers, the Industrial Congress’s record of achievement, appears meager. And yet the true significance of the Industrial Congress may lie less in what it achieved in terms of tangible benefits for the white wage workers and more in its role in bringing about a political alliance between the various antislavery and labor-reform constituencies that would help to transform antislavery politics over the following decade.5

3 The New England Mechanic, quoted in Young America, 26 April 1845; Young America, May 10, October 18, 1845. 4 Harbinger I, no. 9 (9 August 1845), 144. 5 Previous studies that have included discussions the Industrial Congresses have tended to either ignore their origins in the mid-1840s and/or conflate the national Congresses with the New York City Industrial Congress, a spin-off organization that drew even more heavily from local trades unionists. See, for example Ivor Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 85–91; David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 110; Anthony Gronowicz, Race Class and Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). After the Civil War, another series of “Industrial Congresses” were held annually after 1873; although their name suggests an obvious lineage with the prewar Congresses, more work needs to be done to establish a direct connection. See Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans: 1862–1872 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 181–85, 192–96.

228 Although they ultimately fell short of the other lofty goals set forth in the Preliminary

Convention, the ten annual Congresses held between 1846 and 1855 represented an extraordinary coming-together of antebellum reform elements, one that brought together trades unionists, land reformers, Associationists, abolitionists, and advocates of temperance, women’s rights, ten-hours laws, pacifism, and the abolition of all government. The official call to convene the first Congress, published in Young America, the New-York Tribune, the Harbinger and elsewhere, was signed by George Henry Evans as well as by National Reformers Alvan Bovay and Ransom Smith, the Associationist Parke Godwin, the abolitionist, Associationist, and

Universalist minister William H. Channing, “no-government man” Benjamin D. Timms, and

New England Workingmen’s Association representative Albert Gilbert. Women as well as men attended as full members with equal privileges, as did at least one African American delegate.

Despite this diversity of reform causes, the men and women who attended the Industrial

Congresses were united on the principle, stated in the official “call,” that “the proper object of government is to protect Natural Rights... [and] secure [them] to ALL.”6

Nonetheless, the very name of the Industrial Congress implied that its specific focus would be on ameliorating the societal ills brought about by the spread of mechanized manufacturing and wage labor. As Voice of Industry editor John Orvis described it, its purpose was to address the “real issue between all parties,” the need “to reconcile the relations of labor and capital.”7 The Congress served as an umbrella organization for labor interests, akin to a national trades union organization—the first such effort since the General Trades Unions of the

1830s. Like the earlier GTU, the Congresses were “industrial” in the sense that they attempted to

6 “National Convention—Union of Reformers—Industrial Congress,” Young America, 4 October 1845. According to the original “Call,” “Farmers, Mechanics, and other useful classes,” along with “all the friends of reform,” were invited to send delegates “in number not exceeding the number of their State representatives for each locality.” 7 Voice of Industry, 29 June 1848.

229 organize the representatives of labor along lines that transcended traditional distinctions of skill and craft—a solidarity that was, uniquely for the period, at times extended even across lines of gender and class. Like the GTU and Working Men’s Parties of the 1820s and 30s, the Industrial

Congress also opened its doors to middle-class reformers, employers, and professional politicians. As radical Democrat Parke Godwin wrote to fellow Associationist Charles Dana in the spring of 1845, “I like the Industrial Congress matter immensely... [working people] are beginning to find out that we are the only [ones] qualified to lead them...We ought not to throw away the opportunity.” Godwin expressed some surprise that the reformism behind the Industrial

Congress “takes with the working-people here [in New York], who will send delegates.” But he also recognized the importance of winning the support of the working class to advance the social reforms he and other social reformers cared about, telling Dana that Associationists must look for support “as coming from the working classes,” since “we can only meet the opposition yet to come... by making ourselves one with the Masses.”8 Although attended by and to some extent controlled by land reformers like Evans and middle-class radicals like Bovay and Godwin, the

Congresses attracted the cooperation and participation of working-class delegates, including representatives of trades unions, and remained focused throughout their existence on legislative reforms that organizers believed would directly benefit wage workers, including ten-hours laws and land reform measures.9

8 Parke Godwin to Charles Dana, April 26, 1845, in Bryant-Godwin Papers, NYPL. 9 On the representation of organized labor at the Industrial Congresses, see Helene Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 65–69. Evans and other National Reform leaders consistently took pains to emphasize the connections between land reform and the Working Men’s movement of the 1820s and 30s, a link embodied not only by Evans but by converts to land reform like John Commerford. See Working Man’s Advocate, 30 March 1844, 6, 20 April 1844. At the Industrial Congress in New York in 1847, Evans made a direct connection between the National Reformers and the General Trades Union’s endorsement of land reform in in 1834. See the New-York Tribune, 7 June 1847; Voice of Industry 18 June 1847. The first Congress also provided for the formation of trades union-like “Industrial Brotherhoods” and “Industrial Sisterhoods” (both closed to employers) as well as “Young America Societies” (open to all “friends of reform”). Full lists of delegates and “other interested persons” for 1845 Preliminary Convention and 1848 Congress were published in the New-York Tribune, 15 October, 1845, 24 June 1848, in Commons, ed., Documentary History VIII:2, 26–28.

230

To an extent not seen since the days of the Working Men in the late 1820s, the Industrial

Congress heralded the organization of labor in a body that harbored explicitly political intentions, as land and labor reformers once again turned to legislative remedies for the ills they confronted. The ten-hour movement had already begun to bear fruit; President Van Buren had signed an executive order mandating a ten-hour day for employees on federal government public works projects in 1840, and in 1847, became the first state to pass a ten-hours law, followed by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and Rhode Island.10 Meanwhile, the National

Reform Association had inaugurated its program of interrogating candidates for office, fielding their own candidates for local office, and sending memorials to Congress. The National Reform program, Alvan Bovay argued, “was political in its character... [and] considered political action essential in all political reforms... they can only effect their object through the ballot box.”

Delegates to the Industrial Congress, Evans believed, should “endeavor, as much as possible, to meet each other’s views, and then decide what reform, if any, could be carried to the ballot box”; to effect change, in Evans’ view, “they must elect members of Congress thoroughly impregnated with the doctrine” of free soil and free labor.11 Although attended by middle-class reformers like

Bovay and Albert Brisbane, land reformers like Evans and Lewis Ryckman, and professional politicians like William Wait and Theophilus Fisk, the Congresses attracted the cooperation and participation of working-class delegates, including representatives of trades unions, and

10 The effectiveness of these laws was minimal, however: first, they were limited to laborers on state contracts or public works; second, they were widely ignored; and third, loopholes such as the New Hampshire law’s stipulation that ten hours would comprise a day’s work “in absence of a contract to the contrary” made them unenforceable. Helene Zahler, however, believed the passage of ten-hour laws was one of the factors that helped land reformers win converts from the Association movement; see Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 87. For Van Buren’s Executive Order and interpretation, see Commons, ed. Documentary History VIII: 2, 85. 11 Young America, 10 May 1845.

231 remained focused throughout their existence on legislative reforms that organizers believed would directly benefit wage workers, including ten-hours laws and land reform measures.12

Evolving as it did during the rapidly-developing crisis over the extension of slavery in the territories and given its declared purpose to form a “union of reformers,” the Industrial Congress movement could not but confront its relationship to an emerging politics of antislavery. Central to both its encounter with antislavery and to its overall direction was the doctrine of land reform.

Indeed, adherence to the basic principles of land reform, along with a Jeffersonian commitment to equality and the producerist recognition of the right to the product of one’s labor were the only qualifications for joining the associations of working men and women who elected representatives to the Congress. As had previous generations of workingmen before them, the founders of the Industrial Congress rewrote the Declaration of Independence to explicitly recognize these principles, then made them the criteria for membership in the organization.

Article II of the new body’s Constitution stipulated that

its members shall be elected annually by industrial bodies or associations of men who subscribe to these principles, to wit: ‘That all men are created equal—that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are the right to life and liberty, to the fruits of their labor, to the use of such a portion of the earth and the other elements as shall suffice to provide them with the means of subsistence and comfort, to education and paternal protection from society.’13

12 Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 77–78. On the representation of organized labor at the Industrial Congresses, see Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 65–69. Evans and other National Reform leaders consistently took pains to emphasize the connections between land reform and the Working Men’s movement of the 1820s and 30s, a link embodied not only by Evans but by converts to land reform like John Commerford. See Working Man’s Advocate, 30 March 1844, 6, 20 April 1844. At the Industrial Congress in New York in 1847, Evans made a direct connection between the National Reformers and the General Trades Union’s endorsement of land reform in in 1834. See the New-York Tribune, 7 June 1847; Voice of Industry 18 June 1847. The first Congress also provided for the formation of trades union-like “Industrial Brotherhoods” and “Industrial Sisterhoods” (both closed to employers) as well as “Young America Societies” (open to all “friends of reform”). Full lists of delegates and “other interested persons” for 1845 Preliminary Convention and 1848 Congress were published in the New-York Tribune, 15 October, 1845, 24 June 1848, in Commons, ed., Documentary History VIII:2, 26–28. 13 “Constitution of the Industrial Congress,” Young America, 25 October, 1845.

232 Of course, Evans had long believed that land reform was the “common ground on which all reformers could meet.” But by the mid-1840s, there were signs that he and his small band of

National Reformers were no longer alone. 14

The Origins of the Industrial Congress: Land Reform, the Ten-Hours Movement, and Cooperative Free Labor

Much as the National Reformers’ involvement with Anti-rent had helped to launch the land reform movement into the political arena, the germ of the Congress was the product of on- the-ground organizing, this time in New England; the result of connections forged between land reformers, Associationists, and ordinary workers and craft unionists in the hardscrabble textile mill and shoemaking centers.15 For years, New England workers had been organized politically around the issue of ten-hours laws—legislation limiting the legal work day to ten hours. In June,

1844, the Mechanics’ Association of Fall River, Massachusetts, issued a call for a “general

Convention” of trades unionists and supporters.16 Leaders of the newly-organized National

Reform Association, including Evans, saw the convention as an opportunity to consolidate support for land reform among wage workers outside of New York City. That October, National

Reformers Evans, Bovay, Thomas Ainge Devyr, and Mike Walsh attended as delegates,

14 “Industrial Convention,” Young America, 18 October 1845. 15 New England labor journals like the Boston Laborer endorsed the National Reform program in full, publishing the text of the NRA memorial to Congress (see “The Agrarian League,” Boston Laborer, in People’s Rights, 24 July 1844). Voice of Industry editor William F. Young thought the Protective Unions—bodies of wage workers organized along “industrial” rather than craft lines that served as hybrid trades unions and mutual benefit societies, had been “instrumental” in bringing their members into contact with National Reform. Young believed that nine out of ten workingmen were in favor of land reform. “Industrial Congress, Second Session—First Day,” Voice of Industry 18 June 1847, 2 October 1845. The Voice, based in the textile factory town of Lowell, carried numerous articles on land reform throughout its brief existence; see for example 10 April, 1846; 19 March, 7 May, 2 July, 8, 15, 29 October, 1847. Between early 1847 and April, 1848, the Voice was edited by land reformers John Allen and John Orvis. Allen was also an enthusiastic Associationist; Orvis later became prominent in the Knights of Labor and other postwar labor organizations; see David Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 414. 16 “Circular: To the Mechanics of New England,” People’s Rights, 24 July 1844; “New England Convention,” Working Man’s Advocate, 20 July 1844. The Circular calling for the convention was printed in the Mechanic (Fall River), the Laborer (Boston), the New England Operative (Lowell), the Manchester Operative (Manchester, NH), the Olive Branch (Boston), the Investigator (Boston), the Vox Populi (Lowell), and the Phalanx (New York), as well as the Working Man’s Advocate and People’s Rights. The latter two publications, under the direction of Evans, devoted advertising space to the Circular, of which it reprinted several thousand copies.

233 traveling in the darkened second-class carriage of a passenger train to Boston, where the

Convention had been moved after Fall River was deemed too inconvenient. Once there, Evans and Devyr formally endorsed the main demand of the New England mechanics, the passage of ten-hours laws. Walsh, the flamboyant leader of New York’s proletarian “Spartan Band,” traveled to factory towns Fall River and Lowell, where he gave rousing speeches emphasizing the connections between ten-hours and land reform. Subsequently, demands for ten-hours laws were added to the three National Reform planks in official NRA publications. The “Ten Hours

System,” Evans explained,” was a “means”; Freedom of the Public Lands was the “end.”17

Nor were Evans and his still-miniscule coalition of radical New York City Democrats and sweated New England operatives alone. Horace Greeley of the influential New-York Tribune had concluded by the spring of 1846 that land reform was “the basis of union and of the True

Democracy”; its principles, he now believed, should not only be applied to the Public Lands “but to all Lands.” Given the substantial inroads Associationists had made among New England’s burgeoning labor movement as well as Greeley’s own longstanding support for the rights of labor, land reform was the natural analogue to both Association and labor reform, or what

Greeley called “the Ten Hour regulation.”18 Greeley was the most influential figure associated with Fourierism to be converted to land reform around this time, but far from the only one. With the fading of the Fourierist Phalanxes, and perhaps fearful of losing their influence within the

New England labor movement, former Associationists in Boston and Brook Farm also moved

17 Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 58–63; Working Man’s Advocate, 19 October 1844, 2 November 1844; 15 February, 22 March, 1845; Lause 24–25; “The Ten Hours System,” Young America 11 July 1846. See also Thomas Devyr’s account in Devyr, The Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century, or “Chivalry” in Modern Days... American Section, (Greenpoint, NY: 1882), 41. 18 Greeley to , April 22, 1846, Horace Greeley Papers, New York Public Library.

234 towards an embrace of land reform.19 Meanwhile, local committees of workingmen in Lynn and

Boston independently endorsed free land as a solution to the condition of labor. Ultimately, the

Boston convention passed resolutions that echoed the demands and rhetoric of the land reformers nearly word-for-word, while other pronouncements reflected the influence of Associationists.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of the Boston convention was the formation of the New

England Workingmen’s Association, founded by Lewis Ryckman, Voice of Industry editor John

Orvis, and Boston Investigator publisher Horace Seaver, who sought to build an inclusive working-class organization along the lines of the 1830s New England Association of Farmers,

Mechanics, and Other Working Men. Although Associationists like Ryckman enjoyed an outsize influence over the body, the NEWA enjoyed a broad base of support among New England workers, and the new organization adopted the program of the land reformers whole cloth.20

The collaboration between land reformers, Associationists, and workers also gave rise to a host of producers’ and consumers’ co-ops, “mechanics’ exchanges,” and other cooperative- based ventures throughout the late 1840s and 1850s. Originating in New England in labor antislavery strongholds like Lynn, Fall River, and Worcester, the Protective Unions soon spread to New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and other cities in the industrializing Northeast and

Middle West.21 Like the older craft unions and “benevolent societies,” the Protective Unions provided benefits like accident and sickness insurance, pensions, and payouts to widows and

19 On the collaboration between National Reform and Association, see Lause, Young America, 34–39; Carl J. Guarneri, Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) 296–97, 306–09, and passim; as well as Chapters Four and Five, above. 20 Zahler cites the demands of the Lynn committee for hours of labor laws, lien laws, and universal education as well as reports in the Boston Investigator and Voice of Industry as evidence that “mechanics” dominated the NEWA and other New England labor reform groups despite the efforts of middle-class reformers with Associationist leanings to claim leadership. See Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 61–63, n10 and 13; as well as the Working Man’s Advocate February, 22 March, 1845; Harbinger I, no. 22; Voice of Industry 23 January 1846. 21 On the role of Protective Unions in the NYCIC, see the Tribune, 7 June, 30 July, 1850. On the formation and organization of the Protective Union movement in New England, see the Voice of Industry, 14 November 1845; 30 January, 3 April, 17 September, 27 November, 4 December, 1846; 30 July, 10, 17, 24 September; 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 October, 1847; and Commons, Documentary History VIII:2, 263–85.

235 orphans of workers who died prematurely. But unlike these older organizations, they cut across craft lines and dedicated themselves to the organization of consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives. The Protective Unions set up exchanges where workers could find markets for the products of their labor and purchase groceries and other goods at low prices, similar to the “labor for labor” and “time stores” pioneered by Cincinnati’s Josiah Warren, the Fourierist phalanxes, and the “labour exchanges” set up by English Owenites.22 By intervening in the market for consumer goods, the Protective Union movement sought to substitute cooperation for competition; by eliminating the logic of profit, it sought to return, if not “the whole product of labor,” a fairer portion of its fruits. By the early 1850s, Protective Unions had been organized in all of the New England states as well as in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; an umbrella organization, the New England Protective Union (NEPU), was thought to have over three hundred sub-divisions, conducting transactions one member estimated to be in excess of $2 million.23

Like the land reformers and Fourierists before them, the Protective Union movement accepted the logic of the market while challenging reigning definitions of free labor. The

Worcester division of the NEPU declared that its purpose was “not to destroy Commerce... but make it more just, humane, and impartial.”24 But in other ways, the rhetoric of the Protective

Unions defined “free labor” in ways that transcended the emerging consensus based on self-

22 Lause, Young America, 31–33, 65–66, 90; Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn Massachusetts 1780–1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 200–01. According to Faler, Lynn shoemakers had been the first to establish a cooperative store, the New England Protective Union No. 4 on Union Street. In Boston, Henry P. Trask, a carriage maker and former Brook Farmer, organized the Working Men’s Protective Union in 1844-45 and soon became “the Fourierists’ chief intermediary with local workers” as well as an advocate of land reform. See Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 310. Lause reminds us that the distinctions between protective unions, benevolent societies, and traditional trade unions were porous and overlapping rather than hard and fast. See Lause, Free Labor, 5. 23 “Appendix A,” in Lause, Young America; “To the Public” (back cover), Constitution of the New England Protective Union, and By-Laws of Worcester Division, No. 12, State of Massachusetts (Worcester: Henry J. Howland, n.d. 1852). 24 Ibid.

236 ownership, wage labor, and freedom of mobility. Their publications echoed the idea embodied by the cooperative exchanges, that every worker must receive “the full reward of his own industry,” and frequently contained frequent denunciations of “the wages system.” [fn] An early report of the Working Men’s Protective Union in Boston advocated the “right of every human being to the soil whereon, and the tools and machinery” needed to secure the right to labor, and insisted that “our Lowells must be owned by the artizans who build them, and the operatives who run the machinery and do all the work.”25 Although it rarely did so directly, the Protective

Unions also occasionally skirted the issue of slavery. The Constitution and By-Laws of NEPU

Division No. 134, of Winchendon, Massachusetts, hearkened back to the producerist rhetoric of free labor republicanism to condemn the existence of any class that sought to “obtain their living by the toils of others, while they repose in ease themselves,” a category which for many New

England workingmen embodied southern “Lords of the Lash” as well as northern “Lords of the

Loom.”26 Philadelphia’s Harmony Division No. 1, a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Confederated

Protective Union, assumed and sought “to make practical” the fact that “the Human Race is one

Great Brotherhood... having but one interest and destiny.” Identifying “the great question of property” as “the most vital of all questions to human progress,” the Harmony Division lamented that the American Revolution had “asserted broad principles, without seeking to apply them in detail,” leaving such questions of property “untouched.” The true conflict of interest was between “a LABOR Party and a CAPITAL Party,” or, “looking to last results,” between a

LIBERTY Party, and a SLAVERY party.” While predicated on the old “wage slavery” contention that “Slavery admits of degrees,” the Harmony Division’s formulation went farther

25 Working Man’s Advocate, 11 January 1845. 26 Constitution and By-Laws of the New England Protective Union. Division, No. 134, Winchendon, Mass (Fitchburg: C. C. Curtis, 1850), 8–9.

237 than that of most free laborites by appearing to prioritize the conflict between “liberty” and

“slavery” above and beyond that between labor and capital. Looking still further ahead, the

Harmony Division prophesied the formation of a “Democratic Socialist” political party that would “secure favorable political action” in the realms of land limitation, banking reform, and equal rights for women.27

Gathering in Lowell in March, 1845, the NEWA issued its endorsement of “the two great fundamental Rights of Man—the Right of Labor and the Right to the Soil,” and added the three

National Reform measures to its call for a ten-hours law. It was at the Lowell meeting that the call was first issued for the organization of a national governing body dubbed the Industrial

Congress. Two months later in May, the call to organize an Industrial Congress was reiterated at the first National Reform Convention at New York’s Croton Hall and the First Annual Meeting of the NEWA in Boston’s Tremont Temple in June.28

The “Preliminary Industrial Congress” that met in New York the following October drafted a Constitution (from which the Preamble is quoted above), establishing that delegates would be elected by associations of between five and fifty men and women who subscribed to a revised version of the Declaration of Independence that added guarantees to “the use of such a portion of the Earth and the other elements as shall be sufficient to provide them with the means of subsistence and comfort” and to “Education and Paternal Protection from Society” to the

Declaration’s promises of life, liberty, and equality. Illinois judge William S. Wait presided over the convention, which established three main organizational branches: “Industrial Brotherhoods”

27 Ibid.; Constitution of Harmony Division, No. 1, of the Pennsylvania Confederated Protective Union, with an Outline of its Principles and Proposed Measures (Philadelphia: United States Book and Job Printing Office, 1850), 3–8. Philadelphia ironworker, land reformer, and NIC delegate John Sheddon was among the Harmony Division’s officers. See also Commons, Documentary History, VIII:2, 119–3, 263–334. 28 Boston Laborer 26 October 1844; New-York Tribune, 24 March 1845; “The Convention—An Industrial Congress,” Young America, May 10, 1845; “First Annual Meeting of the N.E. Working Men’s Association,” Harbinger I, No. 1 (June 14, 1845), 15.

238 whose membership barred employers; “Industrial Sisterhoods” for women of any employment status who embraced the “great cause of Industrial Reform”; and “Young America societies” open to all. The dominance by land reformers and the prominence of middle-class intellectuals like Associationist Albert Brisbane and National Reformer Alvan Bovay, not to mention the presence of rank outsiders like Wait, have led some scholars to question how representative the

Congresses were of working-class interests. Yet, while the scant records of the Congresses make such speculation difficult to ascertain, labor unions as such were represented at least in several of the Congresses, and, in addition to its official embrace of the ten-hours movement, the

Congresses discussed questions surrounding the right to organize and made appeals for striking weavers at Fall River. By 1846, John Allen of the Voice of Industry could declare that “We have never yet known a [trade] Unionist, who was not in favor of National Reform.”29

Initially, however, signs of a strong commitment to antislavery in the Industrial Congress were scant. The published call for the first Congress had praised the abolition movement as

“sincere, ardent, [and] heroic,” but, in a now-familiar refrain, criticized it for failing to recognize that chattel slavery was “only one of the many modes of oppression that the productive labor has to endure.” Despite the participation of abolitionists like Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, Charles

Dana, John A. Collins, and others, the Congresses remained focused on the issues most germane to free white wage workers in the North, and the subjects of slave emancipation and equal rights for free African Americans were broached only in passing before the mid-1850s, when they would inescapably come to the fore. Throughout the decade, labor reformers continued to face criticism from abolitionists over their lack of commitment to abolition and racial equality.30 Nor,

29 Voice of Industry, 19 June 1846. Admittedly, Allen, as an active National Reformer, was a biased source, but correspondence to the Voice and other evidence of labor activity in and around Lowell, where the Voice was published, suggest that he was far from alone in his advocacy of land reform. 30 See, for example, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, 18 March 1848; 21 July 1848.

239 of course, were National Reformers and others associated with the early labor movement immune to charges of racism. A few laborites expressed openly racist sentiments or rejected antislavery outright. John Campbell, the Philadelphia writer and labor leader who published the viciously racist Negrophobia, quickly bolted Industrial Congress after it began to adopt a more strongly antislavery stance. Some Baltimore delegates, too, were apparently disturbed by the nomination of Gerrit Smith at the Industrial Congress of 1848, which they denounced as an

“Abolition Convention” upon returning home.31

Other signs, however, suggest that at least some labor reformers were genuinely committed to the principles of “equality, liberty, and brotherhood” established in the Congress’s constitution. The Homestead, the local organ of National Reform in Salem, Massachusetts, published an editorial to refute charges that the Salem NRA prohibited blacks and women from membership. Women had frequently attended National Reform meetings in Salem, the

Homestead pointed out, and “we know that at least one colored person attended our meetings on one or more occasions.” More importantly, the editor of the Homestead pointed out, “there is nothing in our Constitution or By-Laws which would prohibit any white or black person, male or female, from participating in our meetings, or prevent any one from aiding us to carry out our objects.”32

31 Dr. Snodgrass to the Editor of the National Era, 20 July 1848; Devyr to , 9 December 1859, Johnson-Patterson Papers (quoted in Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 104 n57). Snodgrass, on the other had, informed readers of the Era that he attended to the Congress for the specific purpose of promoting Smith’s nomination, but now feared that the actions of anti-abolition delegates had “destroyed whatever prospects there might have been of a National Reform ticket” in Baltimore. 32 A.H., “Misrepresentations,” reprinted in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, 31 March 1848. Another National Reformer had previously corrected a statement of “Mr. Delany”—possibly the black abolitionist —to the effect that the NRA did not accept blacks or women during a public speaking engagement in Salem; reportedly, the NRA member “received the thanks of the speaker for the correction.” For the apolitical, Garrisonian Bugle, however, the issue hinged on whether or not allowing disenfranchised women and blacks as members had any real meaning given the NRA’s self-proclaimed political ambitions (although, contrary to the Bugle, the NRA never, or only rarely, claimed to be a political party). The Bugle’s account reveals that the “misrepresentation” stemmed from an earlier incident in which a resolution admitting members who opposed political action was rejected by the Salem Association. To the Garrisonian editors of the Bugle, this proscription of “disunionists” was tantamount to discrimination based on sex or race.

240 Elsewhere, there were signs that the injustices of chattel slavery were beginning to penetrate the consciousness of the broader labor movement. At a convention of the New England

Anti-Slavery Society in May, 1845, an aging Robert Owen had taken the floor to declare his opposition to “Negro slavery,” but also made the now-standard comparisons between enslaved

African Americans and British factory workers. A few months later, however, when the fading

Owenite movement held a “World’s Convention” in New York (which took place the same month as the inaugural Industrial Congress and was attended by Evans, Ryckman, Bovay and other National Reformers), a “Mr. Peebles” took Owen to task “for blinking the question about

Negro Slavery.” Although a “stout Irishman” in “a great rage” denied the charge, a resolution was subsequently passed, despite what a reporter described as “a good deal of grumbling,” that prioritized the abolition of chattel slavery over so-called other forms.33

From the antislavery stronghold of Lowell, “A Factory Girl” wrote to the Voice of

Industry expressing her increasing unwillingness to “keep quiet about slavery” when southern visitors toured the mills, “lest our pro-slavery friends should return to the South without having heard one word of anti-slavery truth.” In the shoemaking center of Lynn, Massachusetts, a meeting of workingmen passed resolutions declaring their intention to be “consistent” by helping to secure “those rights and privileges for which we are contending for ourselves” for the “three millions of our brethren and sisters groaning in chains on the Southern plantations.” The meeting further pledged that “we will not take up arms to sustain the Southern slaveholders in robbing one-fifth of our countrymen of their labor,” and urged northern laborers to “speak out in thunder tones” against slavery, “both as associations and individuals.”34 A July Fourth “Great Mass

33 Voice of Industry, 25 September 1845; “B” to Horace Greeley, New-York Tribune, Sept 10 1845; Liberator, 6 June 1846; Niles’ National Register, 25 October 1845. See Commons on World’s Convention. 34 George E. McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement: The Problem of To-Day (Boston and New York, 1887), 107.

241 Meeting of the Industrial Reformers” in 1847 similarly appealed to solidarity with abolitionists by declaring that “the hired laborer of the North deeply sympathizes with his brother slave at the

South.” A few months later, the Massachusetts National Reform Convention declared slavery “a crime against Humanity so outrageous” that “ought to be abolished immediately,” noting that the

“present crisis” had lent “peculiar force” to the question “what is necessary to be done to abolish

Slavery?” To that end, the Convention urged abolitionists in general to cooperate in the amelioration of non-enslaved workers, and particularly urged “our antislavery and ‘no-voting’ friends,” the Garrisonians, to adopt “POLITICAL ACTION” towards both abolition and land reform.35

A correspondent to the Tribune, explaining the rationale behind the upcoming Industrial

Congress, elaborated on the ways in the persistence of chattel slavery was linked to the fate of free labor in the North. “There is a mutual union and dependence—a solidarity between all classes,” the correspondent wrote, and the degradation of free labor by the persistence of slavery

“proves... [that] none can attain to a high state of elevation and happiness without the relative happiness and elevation of others.” Around the same time, the NEWA passed a resolution that seemed to recognize that principle by forthrightly stating that “American slavery must be uprooted before the elevation sought by the laboring class can be effected.” At last, white workers were appearing to recognize the connection between the perpetuation of slavery and the

35 “National Reform Convention,” Voice of Industry, 5 November 1847. It should be noted that many of these declarations continued to link denunciations of chattel slavery with “wages slavery.” An “Address” to the Massachusetts Convention written by freethought reformer Horace Seaver and Worcester National Reformer Appleton Fay pleaded, “if some solicit your aid in the protection of the rights of the white man–if others ask your assistance in alleviated the oppressions of the colored man—we entreat you to co-operate with us in the protection and security of all men in the full possession and free exercise of every natural Right.” On Fay and Worcester NRA, see Bronstein, Working Class Land Reform, 175–76.

242 fate of free labor, anticipating Karl Marx’s oft-quoted aphorism that “labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”36

The Mexican War, the Wilmot Proviso, and the Resurrection of Labor Movement Antislavery

When Pennsylvania Congressman rose in the House of Representatives on the evening of August 8th, 1846 to propose what became known as the Wilmot Proviso—a resolution that made President Polk’s request for $2 million in funds to secure the Treaty of

Guadalupe Hidalgo’s purchase of California and contingent on the provision that

“neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory”—he touched off a firestorm over the issue of slavery in the territories that would ultimately redefine the national relationship to the peculiar institution. As alarmed southerners noted at the time, the

North and West stood briefly united on preventing slavery’s expansion westward, with every congressman from the states north of the Mason-Dixon line voting in favor of the Proviso; only in the Senate, where southerners continued to control a plurality of votes, was the measure defeated.37 That white northerners saw the spread of slavery into the territories as threatening to their interests has long been taken as a given in studies of the pre-Civil War period. But few recent historians have probed beyond the presumed racial consensus behind white northerners’ opposition to slave expansion, the idea that they merely wanted to preserve the territories for

“free white labor,” barring them to both slavery and free blacks. And indeed, developments like provisional government of the Oregon Territory passed laws banning both slavery and free black

36 Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From Colonial Times to the Civil War (Citadel, 1960), 112; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (Penguin Classics, 1990), 414. 37 Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 1st sess., 1217–18. Twenty-two northern Senators voted with the South against the Proviso on March 3, 1847, but as Jonathan Earle and Leonard Richards have pointed out, none were members of the Van Buren/Wilmot wing of the party, and all but four were lame-duck congressmen serving the final day of their term. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 137.

243 in-migration in 1844 and 1849, and Wilmot’s own declaration that in proposing his Proviso, he had acted “not out of morbid sympathy for the slave,” but out of support “for the rights of white freemen,” undeniably lend credence to this interpretation.38

To conclude, however, that what soon came to be branded “Free Soil” was not legitimately antislavery, or that it served merely as a cover for a white-supremacist land grab that tolerated slavery where it already existed at the expense of free black rights in the North, is to ignore both the ways in which different constituencies of antislavery northerners defined “free soil” as well as the Free Soilers’ own larger strategies and intentions. Evans and other National

Reformers had used the term “free soil” to describe their favored reform at least since 1844, and the seeds for what became the third-party revolt of 1848 were planted at an Albany meeting of

Anti-renters, National Reformers, and Liberty Party men who bolted from the Anti-rent state convention in October, 1846 to form what they dubbed the Free Soil Party.39 As we have seen,

Evans supported both the abolition of slavery and the equal right of African Americans and

Native Americans to the land, even if he sometimes envisioned the fulfillment of these rights in a separate state or territory reserved for that purpose.40 No wonder, then, that conservatives like

James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer denounced the Proviso as the work of “Anti- renters, vote-yourself-a-farm men, Fourierites, Radicals, and Abolitionists.” But as Jonathan

Earle has pointed out, even more mainstream northern Democrats who supported the Proviso did so because they thought it would provide an effective barrier to slave expansion that would

38 Wilmot quoted in Congressional Globe, 29th Congress, 2d sess., 1847, Appendix, p. 317. For the “whiteness” interpretation of the Wilmot Proviso and Free Soil movement, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Verso, 2003), 153–54; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 43–95. 39 Workingman’s Advocate, September 14, November 23, 1844; Huston, Land and Freedom, 168–70; Lause, Young America, 77. For other uses of the term “free soil” by Evans and the National Reformers that predate the Wilmot Proviso, see Young America, April 19, June 28, 1845. 40 See Chapter Four of this volume as well as People’s Rights and Working Man’s Advocate, July 6, 1844; Working Man’s Advocate, Aug. 17, 1844; People’s Rights, July 24, 1844.

244 choke off slavery and eventually lead to its abolition throughout the United States. Although

Wilmot stated that the Proviso “does not propose the abolition of slavery, either in States or in

Territories,” he also predicted that “slavery has within itself the seeds of its own dissolution.

Keep it within given limits, let it remain where it now is, and in time it will wear itself out”—the same strategy adopted by Republican anti-extensionists in the 1850s. In this way, Wilmot explained, the restriction of slavery would “at no distant day... insure the redemption of the

Negro from his bondage in chains.”41

Wilmot and other supporters of the Proviso saw themselves as acting in the tradition of

Locofoco Democrats like William Leggett. Jacob Brinkerhoff, the Ohio Democrat who co- authored the Proviso, linked Free Soilism to the Locofoco doctrines of a decade earlier, and invoked the memory of William Leggett to make his point. Jefferson and Leggett had been the

“apostles” of “the Free Soil gospel,” Brinkerhoff proclaimed, and, were Leggett now alive, “he would be with us—his voice, calling us to combat the influence of slavery, would be heard, eloquent as of yore.” Gamaliel Bailey’s National Era, claiming that the Buffalo Convention represented “The Turn of the Tide” in favor of antislavery, saw the advent of Free Soil as the fulfillment of Leggett’s prophecy of a “revolution” of northern public opinion on the Slavery question.42 Its is true that, in turning to well-worn arguments about the superiority of free labor to slave labor, antiextensionists often focused on the “degrading” and “disgraceful” influence of slavery and/or slaves in proximity to free labor, and failed to make more compelling arguments grounded in political economy. But, building on the prolabor and anticapitalist critiques of the

41 New York Courier and Enquirer, 11 August 1847, quoted in Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 60; Wilmot quoted in Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 124, 133. Wilmot’s comments were made at the Herkimer Free Soil convention in 1847. 42 “The Turn of the Tide,” National Era, 31 August 1848. The same issue of the National Era published Brinkerhoff’s address and Van Buren’s acceptance of the Buffalo Convention’s nomination. On Leggett’s influence on Wilmot personally, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 127.

245 previous decade, they also transmuted Jacksonian arguments about the “Money Power” to the new menace posed by the “Slave Power.” Wilmot, who repeatedly referred to himself as a champion of “labor,” sought the Slave Power’s origins in “the thousand millions of dollars invested in slaves” and depicted the conflict over free territory as a struggle “between capital and labor.” Other northerners agreed. , writing in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, depicted the struggle over the Proviso as one between “the grand body of white workingmen, the millions of mechanics, farmers, and operatives of our country, with their interests on one side—and the interests of the few thousand rich...and aristocratic owners of slaves at the South, on the other.”

And the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, his long-cherished hopes of establishing a colony for emancipated slaves in Texas or Mexico now dashed, raged against the “cold-blooded viper, tyranny or Texas,” and invoked an antislavery “Legion of Liberty” which included such

Democratic figures as Leggett, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Branagan, Robert Owen, Theodore

Sedgwick, and Orestes Brownson.43

But the proponents of the brand of “free labor” represented by the Industrial Congress also transcended these more traditionally Democratic arguments in important ways—most importantly, by denouncing the war with Mexico. Initially, Evans and some National Reformers had supported the election of Polk as the lesser of two evils, since Henry Clay’s public lands policy was repugnant to them, and had supported Texas annexation on the condition that slavery be banned there.44 But by the end of 1846, Evans would be denouncing Polk in the pages of

43 Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 142; Richards, Slave Power; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1 Sept 1847; [Benjamin Lundy, ed.], The Anti-Texass Legion. Protest of Some Free Men, States, and Presses against the Texass Rebellion, Against the Lawsof Nature and of Nations (Albany, 1844); Julius Reubens Ames and Benjamin Lundy, eds., The Legion of Liberty! And Force of Truth, Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds, of Some Prominent Apostles, Champions and Martyrs, Tenth ed., (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1847); On Whitman as a manual laborer and labor reformer, see Jason Stacy, Walt Whitman’s Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman’s Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass, 1840–1855 (New York: Peter Land, 2008). 44 “Texas,” Working Man’s Advocate, April 27, 1844; “Great Texas Meeting in the Park,” Working Man’s Advocate, May 11, 1844. Unbeknownst to the land reformers, Polk had dismissed their questionnaire with a note deeming it “not worthy of

246 Young America, as he and other labor reformers demanded an immediate cessation to the

Mexican War—in marked contrast to the other, better-known version of “Young America” promoted by the pro-expansionist Democratic editor John L. O’Sullivan.45

Gathered at Military Hall on the Bowery—site of the old Workingmen’s Party mass meetings of the 1820s and 30s—the 1847 Industrial Congress strongly condemned the war and its outcome. In an “Address to the Citizens of the United States,” the Congress depicted the war as having been “waged at the insistence and behalf of Southern Slavery and Northern Capital.”

Resolutions passed reflected the combination of self-interest and moral indignation that motivated the reformers’ denunciations of the war, as well as the lengths to which they were willing to go to subvert it. Declaring that “it has become apparent that the existing War... must inevitably result in the conquest of new territory, which must fall into the hands of speculators and monopolists, thereby extending and perpetuating wages and chattel slavery, with all their religious, moral and political evils...” the Congress recommended that land and labor reformers use their influence to urge legislators to withhold supplies from the U.S. Army in hopes of bring the war to an end. Other resolutions urged the adoption of a direct tax on property as means of forcing “Southern Slavery and Northern Capital...to bear the expenses” of the war (passed unanimously) and another to abolish the “Standing Army” altogether (narrowly defeated). The

Congress then read a statement from abolitionist and Universalist minister William H. Channing, who had independently concluded that “the capital of the North and the South were leagued together” in bringing on annexation and the war, evidence of the Slave Power that he used to an answer.” Papers of James K. Polk, quoted in Lause, Young America, 27. Only Joseph Smith, the Mormon candidate, answered the National Reformers in full. Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 95. 45 Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 94; “Wholesale Robbery of the People’s Lands—Sacrifice of the Lacklanders—War for Slavery” [from Young America], Voice of Industry, November 27, 1846; Yonatan Eyal, The and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

247 urge his hearers to take “a more radical view of the question of Slavery.”46 Over the next few days, the Congress debated the merits of a proposed constitution offered by Worcester National

Reformer Appleton Fay, that “opened the door to equality” by explicitly acknowledging the rights of African American and women and calling for . Although the constitution was sidelined, Fay thought it “calculated to effect a union of reformers” as well as

“necessary to the success of the free soil doctrine.”47

The Industrial Congress and the Origins of the Liberty Party-Land Reform Alliance

As noted above, both the National Reform Association and the Industrial Congress had harbored political aspirations from their very inception. In 1845, the National Reformers ran

Bovay as its candidate for the New York State Assembly; although he failed to win, this foray into electoral politics added legitimacy to the movement. The following year, at an Anti-rent convention held in Albany in October, National Reformers questioned the Liberty Party candidate for governor Henry Bradley, on his support for National Reform measures. Bradley voiced support for all of the measures except land limitation, and even that gained Bradley’s cautious endorsement. The resulting “Free Soil” ticket that fall culminated in the election of

Mike Walsh and another Democratic supporter of land reform to the state assembly, and seemed to bear out Evans’ hopes that an alliance between land reformers and antislavery forces might wield the balance of power in future elections.48

46 Voice of Industry 11, 18 June, 1847; “Taxation and the War,” Liberator 9 July 1847. The resolution on direct taxation was offered by Charles Hosmer, the New England Associationist whose address to the Labor Reform League of New England was quoted in Chapter Five. Channing quoted in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 5 August 1847 [from the Lowell Journal]. The 1847 Congress was also notable for the participation of a female delegate, Fanny Lee Townsend of Providence, Rhode Island. See also the New-York Daily Tribune, 4, 7 June, 1847; Harbinger V, Vol. 3 (26 June 1847) 48; Niles’ National Register 10 July 1847 for accounts of the Congress’ proceedings. 47 Niles’ National Register, July 10, 1847, 296-97. 48 Lause, Young America, 77–78.

248 The second Industrial Congress, held in Boston in 1846, had recommended the adoption of “the most democratic mode... for nominating candidates for President and Vice President... pledged to the Freedom of the Public Lands, and that all National Reformers or friends of a Free

Soil co-operate to secure their election.”49 At the next year’s Congress in New York, delegate

Broach had expressed his opinion that “land limitation would gain advocates in the abolition ranks. If the public lands were made free, we would get the entire abolition vote.” Evans, for his part, “explained the practicability of carrying land reform by the votes of the small farmers, who were the majority and who would be benefitted by their adoption.”50 Around the same time,

Evans and other likeminded reformers began to publish editorials speculating on the potential

“Power of a Third Party.” Evans had long argued that a third party movement that combined antislavery with land reform could be a powerful force in politics. Noting the decline of Liberty

Party voting totals between 1843 and 1845, Evans posed pointed questions to potential antislavery readers. “How can the Abolitionists ever hope to get the working classes to join a party for the single object of abolishing black slavery, while they themselves are deprived” of their right to the soil, “and how is an abolition party to succeed without the laboring masses?”

Garrisonians and others who “like the editor of the Liberator, are willing to devote themselves to the object of redressing the manifest injustice of society,” Evans counseled, “cannot well afford to be divided in their forces.” Abolitionists must sooner or later acknowledge that “Free Soil,” was “the entering wedge to every great reform.”51

Further possibilities were suggested by the election of John P. Hale to the Senate in 1846.

The antislavery, anti-Texas Hale had lost his seat in the House of Representatives after

49 “Power of a Third Party,” Voice of Industry 19 June 1846 (from Young America). 50 Niles’ National Register, July 10, 1847, 296-97. 51 “Unpaid Toil,” Young America 27 December 1845; Liberator, 4 September 1846.

249 “doughface” Democratic Party regulars read him out of the party, as Evans bitterly noted, “on a strong suspicion of being favorable to Human Rights.” Hale ran for Senate anyway, winning election after Liberty Party men and antislavery Whigs threw their support to him. If the Liberty

Party and National Reformers could similarly be united, Evans hinted, “may they not reasonably expect for them the support of every friend of universal freedom?”52

As it happened, events had been pushing one faction of Liberty Party leaders towards such a union for some time. Although the Liberty Party never polled more votes than the 65, 608 it garnered in the 1844 general election, it held the balance of power in states like New

Hampshire, and George Henry Evans had come to view it as something of a model for the third- party pressure politics that he hoped that the NRA might be in a position to use within a few years. Founded in late 1839-early 1840 by a group of antislavery men, including Alvan Stewart,

Myron Holley, Gerrit Smith, and Elizur Wright, Jr., who had become frustrated with the limitations imposed by Garrisonian abolitionism, the Liberty Party had been viewed from the start as “a mere temporary expedient, to draw or drive the other parties to adopt our principles.”

Thanks in part to the participation of former Democrats like Salmon Chase, , and

Gamaliel Bailey, the Liberty Party had long contained a strain of “radical” Democratic politics, seen in its embrace of anti-monopoly and “free trade” policies.53 Its spokesmen made frequent use of economic arguments about the deleterious impact of slavery on free labor; Stewart, for example, blamed slavery for the “hard times” that followed the Panic of 1837, while the Liberty

52 Quoted in the Voice of Industry, 11 June 1847. In 1844, the National Reformers attempted to gauge Birney’s support by questioning him on his views on ownership of the Public Lands. Birney’s reply suggested that National Reform calls for permanent occupancy of homesteads differed little from ownership of title in . Perhaps more insightfully, he alluded to the desire of western settlers to claim ownership of the lands they settled. The published response of the National Reformers’ Central Committee, made up of Evans, John Windt, E.S. Manning, and unnamed others, focused on the use of soil as a matter of rights, and disputed the right to own property in slaves while continuing to argue that landless workers were the “slaves” of the landowning class. See “Mr. Birney’s Letter,” People’s Rights, 27 July, 1844. 53 Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 83, 103–07, 115. On the Liberty Party generally, see Reinhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848: Antislavery Third Party Politics in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

250 organ the Philanthropist identified “capitalists at the North, who own slave-property at the

South, and others who from business, social connections or otherwise, are interested in perpetuating the supremacy of the slave-interest” as “constituent elements of the Slave-Power.”54

Meanwhile, land reformers’ efforts to interrogate the candidates of the two major parties on their favored measures had proven desultory; neither Clay nor Polk responded to the NRA’s request for clarification of their positions on land reform in 1844. Liberty Party candidate James

Birney, however, had written a politely-worded if ultimately equivocal reply, published in

Evans’ paper the People’s Rights. In response to Birney, the NRA’s Central Committee, composed of Evans, Windt, and Manning, tried to present their cause as the logical extension of the Liberty Party’s antislavery. As the candidate of a party “whose object is the delivery of a particular class from bondage,” the Committee expressed its surprise that Birney was not more

“familiar with the interests of labor and the rights of man.” To deprive a man of his natural right to the soil and make him dependent on another, the National Reformers insisted, was tantamount to enslavement; for “without land he cannot live unless he becomes the slave of another... and no man, or class of men, have a right to hold slaves.”55

Gradually, a significant minority of Libertymen, led by Chase, Goodell, and Gerrit Smith, began to take steps to embrace a wider platform that moved beyond the “one idea” of abolitionism. As early as 1843, proponents of coalition had proclaimed that the Liberty Party would “carry out the principle of equal rights into all its practical consequences and applications, and support every just measure conducive to individual and social freedom.” Elizur Wright, the former American Anti-Slavery Society secretary, and now Liberty Party organizer and editor of

54 Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 87–99; Alvan Stewart, Tract No. 4. The Cause of the Hard Times (Boston 1843); Philanthropist, 16 February 1842; Joshua Leavitt, The Financial Power of Slavery: The Substance of an Address Delivered in Ohio, in September, 1840 (1841). 55 “Mr. Birney’s Letter” and “Reply to Mr. Birney,” People’s Rights, July 27, 1844, p. 3.

251 the Fourier-tinged Boston Daily Chronotype, agreed that “the idea of cementing all the humanities into one party is the true & only true one.” Such sentiments culminated with the formation of a schismatic “Liberty League,” who met at Macedon Lock, New York, in June 1847 to propose the nomination of a presidential candidate on a platform of “universal reform.”56

By then, Gamaliel Bailey’s new Liberty Party paper, the National Era, was telling its readers that the National Reformers had begun to show “a warm side” for the Liberty League, and speculated that James G. Birney would be the candidate of the new alignment. Evans appears to have initially favored the Independent Democrat Hale, but argued that since “these

Liberty men adopt all the National Reform land measures... some means ought to be devised of uniting the strength of both parties on the same candidates.”57 Those means presented themselves during the 1847 Industrial Congress that June, when Appleton Fay reminded delegates that the

Liberty League was meeting simultaneously at Macedon Locks, New York, and proposed sending a delegation “to enquire into the expediency of co-operating” with the Liberty men. The

Congress dispatched Hugh T. Brooks, an Anti-rent activist from upstate New York, to Macedon

Locks for the purpose of proposing unified action.58

At the Macedon Locks Convention, an Industrial Congress resolution was read, pledging to support only those candidates who adopted the National Reform measures.59 Subsequently,

56 Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 117–20; Elizur Wright, Jr. to Gerrit Smith, 18 February 1848, Gerrit Smith Papers. 57 Young America, quoted in the National Era, quoted in the American Freeman, 9 June 1847. 58 Voice of Industry, 25 June 1847; Niles’ National Register, 10 July 1847. Fay also presented a draft constitution for an equal rights, direct-democracy “Free State” that he believed was “was calculated to effect a union of reformers... garrisonians and others”; other delegates opposed the measure on the basis that freedom of the public lands alone would be enough to win “the entire abolition vote.” Part of the opposition stemmed from William Wait’s concern that it “did not recognize the rights of women or of colored people; if adopted, therefore, offence would be taken by the liberty party and other reformers.” Fay, however, replied that the constitution did in fact ‘recognize the equal right of all human beings.” A Mr. Broach, filling in for Thomas Devyr, made the comments about land reform measures being sufficient to attract abolition votes, arguing that “the more simple our measures the better.” 59 The resolution, first read by (and possibly drafted by) Alvan Bovay, read in whole: “Resolved, That Mr. Brooks be requested to inform the Liberty Party Convention to nominate a candidate for the Presidency, that the constituency of this body could support no candidate who will not pledge himself in writing to the four measures of the National Reform Pledge; that if

252 William Goodell’s “Address to the Macedon Convention” added to the Liberty League’s platform an endorsement of the “original right of every human being to occupy a portion of the earth’s surface”—along with demands, in language similar to that used by the National

Reformers, for land limitation, alienation of homesteads from debt, and the reservation of lands to “actual settlers.”60 Taking aim at “the cotton lords of the North” as well as the plantation owners of the South, Goodell claimed that the new platform offered “a connected and consistent system of political economy.” The right to an inalienable homestead was “a Moral Law,”

Goodell now argued; “to talk of a man’s right to SELF-OWNERSHIP without a right to an inch of the earth’s soil... is to talk self-contradiction and nonsense; for the right of self-ownership includes or implies the right of existence, of soil, and of free intercourse.” A set of resolutions passed by the convention thus included one which appeared at last to reconcile the abolitionists’ insistence on the right of self-ownership with labor reformers’ demands to the fruits of their labor. “That we hope to secure for the colored people of this country and all others, a self- ownership that implies the right to occupy space,” the convention’s sixth resolution read, “and includes the right to the products of their industry, and the free disposal of those products.”

[emphasis added] The Macedon Convention then nominated the New York abolitionist and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, whose role as a bridge between land reform and abolition is

both the old parties neglect to nominate candidates in favor of these truly Republican measures, and if the Liberty Party should nominate such candidate, we are of the opinion that the Industrial Congress, at its next session, to which we refer the nomination of Presidential candidate, will be likely to nominate a candidate so introduced to their notice, by a political organization having the cause of human rights at heart.” The resolution was unanimously adopted, and Brooks “immediately took leave of the Congress” to go to Macdeon armed with a copy. Voice of Industry, 25 June 1847; Niles’ National Register, 10 July 1847. 60 National Era, 24 June 1847; Lause, Young America, 89; Rayback, Free Soil, 108–09; Address of the Macedon Convention by William Goodell; and Letters of Gerrit Smith (Albany: S. W. Green, 1847). The Macedeon Address read in part, “Along with the abolition of all other monopolies, we would restrict within reasonable bounds, the extent to which individuals, corporations, or the government, should hold property in land, providing an opportunity for all to become possessors of the soil, and thus enjoy (without its being contested) the original right of every human being to occupy a portion of the earth’s surface, and breathe its free air. To this end, we would also have public lands thrown open to actual settlers, free of cost, and every man’s homestead inalienable, except with his own consent, not being liable to seizure and sale for debt.”

253 described in the previous chapter, along with Massachusetts pacifist Elihu Burritt, a former laborer known as “the learned blacksmith.”61

That November, a National Reform convention in Massachusetts nominated an all- abolitionist slate of former Garrisonian and Liberty Party candidate Samuel E. Sewall for

Governor, political economist Amasa Walker for Lieutenant Governor, and Gerrit Smith for

President.62 The Industrial Congress had adjourned without nominating a candidate in 1847, but at its next meeting, in Philadelphia in 1848, it too, declared Smith its choice for President.

Surveying the vastly altered political landscape of that year, the New England labor journal the

Voice of Industry asked its readers whether any political party or candidate represented the interests of workingmen: “Is there such a man for whom the working men may vote—and such a party with which they may act?” The answer, according to the Voice, was obvious:

Gerrit Smith is the man, and the National Reformers are the party... He is the friend of the oppressed, of every color and clime, and a glorious Achilles in the ranks of the working men... He is in favor of Free Soil in both senses in which it is now used—free from the contamination of slavery, and free to every human being who wishes to use it.63

The Barnburner Revolt and the Struggle For Competing Visions of “Free Soil”

In the same summer of 1847 that witnessed the Macedon Convention and the Industrial

Congress at Military Hall, the abolitionist senator predicted that political fallout

61 “Resolutions Passed by the Macedon Convention,” Voice of Industry (from the Albany Patriot) 7 July 1847; “Industrial Congress—Annual Session at Philadelphia,” New-York Tribune, 21 June 1848. The Voice suggested that “two or three friends” of labor reform attended the convention, but did not specify. The 1848 Congress in Philadelphia also sent a memorial to Congress praying for laws prohibiting traffic in the public lands. Records of the 30th Congress, National Archives. 62 “National Reform Convention,” Voice of Industry, 5 November 1847. It should be noted that many of these declarations continued to link denunciations of chattel slavery with “wages slavery.” An “Address” to the Massachusetts Convention written by freethought reformer Horace Seaver and Worcester National Reformer Appleton Fay pleaded, “if some solicit your aid in the protection of the rights of the white man–if others ask your assistance in alleviated the oppressions of the colored man—we entreat you to co-operate with us in the protection and security of all men in the full possession and free exercise of every natural Right.” On Fay and Worcester NRA, see Bronstein, 175–76. 63 “Where Are We?” Voice of Industry, 29 June 1848.

254 from the Mexican War and the Wilmot Proviso would “derange all party calculations.”

Progressive antislavery and labor elements from both sides of the political divide welcomed this development. Horace Greeley later recalled that, when the Whig national convention that year had nominated Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor and tabled a resolution supporting the Wilmot

Proviso, “I felt that my zeal and my enthusiasm for the Whig cause was also laid there.”64

Although Greeley would not yet fully break with the Whig Party, he and other reformers discerned in the demise of the Second Party System the potential to “dissolve and recombine” the old party alignments “so that the old Hunker Whigs and Loco-Focos shall be put in one file and liberal Progressive Whigs and Democrats go together.”65

In October 1847, the breakaway “Barnburner” faction of New York Democrats had held their Herkimer convention, where they declared themselves devoted to “Free Trade, Free Labor,

Free Soil, Free Speech and Free Men,” the slogan of the new Free Soil Party.66 Barnburner

Democrats now denounced land speculation and openly discussed land reform in the New York legislature, and Whig Governor John Young had even seemed to endorse the idea in his New

Years’ address at the beginning of 1848.67 But much as he had with the Liberty Party over the

64 Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life, including Reminiscences of American Politics and Politicians... (New York: J.B. Ford, 1862), 215. 65 Greeley to Schuyler Colfax, 22 April 1846, Horace Greeley Papers, New York Public Library; quoted in Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), 126; Subterranean, November 17, 1847. "Hunker," a term Walsh took credit for coining, initially referred to Tammany "regular" Democrats with an interest in maintaining the political status quo (i.e., they "hunkered" after spoils); as time went on, the term became increasingly synonymous with the faction of the party opposed to the "Barnburner" and Free Soil elements. During a period of financial duress, Evans had merged his Working Man’s Advocate with Walsh’s Subterranean. Walsh had drifted away from the land reform movement after splitting with Evans, for reasons that remain unclear. Walsh’s fears would appear prophetic when, as a Congressman in 1854, he voted in favor of the Kansas- Nebraska Act—a move that may have led to his electoral defeat and subsequent rapid decline thereafter. Walsh remains a notoriously hard-to-pin-down figure. Despite his reputation as a shill for Calhoun and a proslavery demagogue, his actual record on slavery is much more ambiguous than his vote for Kansas-Nebraska in 1854 suggests. Meanwhile, he continued to publish editorials and offer memorials in favor of land reform even after his break with Evans and the National Reformers. For an example of Walsh’s antislavery stance while serving as a New York State Assemblyman, see “Legislature of New-York,” The Subterranean, February 13, 1847. 66 Charles Sumner to George Sumner, 31 Dec 1846; quoted in Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 131, 146. 67 Lause, Young America, 93; Voice of Industry, 27 July 1848; New-York Daily Tribune, 5 January 1848.

255 previous year, George Henry Evans attempted to steer a cautious path for the National

Reformers, withholding support from any one candidate or party until it was clear that they were pledged to the “true” free-soil measures of land limitation, alienability, and free homesteads. As everyone from Tammany Democrats to Horace Greeley’s dissident Whigs scrambled to embrace

Free Soil, National Reformers weighed the virtues of forming alliances with all or none. Even as they watched the catchphrases they had coined and the reforms they had long advocated become absorbed into the mainstream beginning in the late 1840s, agrarians and labor reformers continued to push for definitions of “free soil” and “free labor” that frequently went beyond the understandings of these terms as they were expressed by the new Free Soil Party. By the end of the decade, the very success of the land reformers’ efforts to spread the gospel of free homesteads and an end to land monopoly was posing new political dilemmas as these ideas were slowly co-opted by politicians, transformed into political sloganeering and absorbed into the legislative process.

Initially, Evans could scarcely contain his optimism that the new movement was the harbinger of a sweeping movement in favor of radical land reform. Noting the endorsement of

National Reform measures in “Van Buren papers” in New York and Cleveland, a “Cass paper in

Philadelphia,” and the Taylor-supporting Philadelphia Daily Sun, Evans confidently waited for public opinion to catch up to these straws in the wind. Once the National Reform measures were

“sufficiently before the people,” Evans predicted, the old parties would “split between Free

Soilers and “Monopolists.” Then would come “the most important political contest of the

256 century,” after which “every American citizen shall feel and know that he has an inalienable home on the Free Soil of America.”68

When it came to the Free Soil Party per se, however, Evans was more cautious. The defections of the Barnburners had been “merely for the spoils of office,” he believed, and the version of land reform proposed at the Buffalo Convention represented a kind of “Sham Free

Soil.”69 Evans had reason to be wary of Van Buren and his Buffalo supporters. Following the well-established practice of questioning candidates, National Reformer Alvan Bovay had written

Van Buren from the Industrial Congress in Philadelphia requesting he divulge his views on land reform. The Little Magician’s reply had been long and evasive. Although he hinted that he was sympathetic, Van Buren declined to offer a direct opinion, although he avowed that he regarded the Public Lands as “a trust fund belonging to all the states to be disposed of for their common benefit,” a repudiation of the Calhounite state’s rights position that held them to be the property of the individual states. A second reply, to the Rochester branch of the NRA, admitted to Van

Buren’s belief in the utility of public land sales to raise revenue, while insisting that the candidate’s response remain confidential. At no point did Van Buren suggest that he might accede to the crucial National Reform demands of land limitation and alienability, and the

Rochester branch refused to endorse him. 70

68 “All Parties for Free Soil!” Young America, 23 September 1848. Other newspapers which had moved towards an embrace of land reform included the Phildelphia Times, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Cincinnati Herald, and Chicago Democrat. See Rayback, Free Soil, 221. 69 “Real and Sham Free Soil” [D.S. Curtiss to Evans, Chicago, Sept 11, 1848, and Evans’ response], Young America, 23 September 1848. 70 Alvan Bovay to Van Buren, 24 June 1848, and Van Buren to Bovay, 20 July 1848; Rochester National Reformers to Van Buren, 28 July 1848, and Van Buren to National Reformers, 22, 24 August 1848; all in Van Buren Papers (Washington, D.C., ). See also “Another Letter from ” [Van Buren to the Alvan Bovay, Lindenwald 20 July 1848], New York Herald, 26 July 1848, p.4; “Real and Sham Free Soil” [D.S. Curtiss to Evans, Chicago, Sept 11, 1848, and Evans’ response], Young America, 23 September 1848. If Van Buren had adopted a true land reform position, Evans explained, National Reformers could have voted for him, even “though he were not all they desired” on abolition and other issues. For a more optimistic reading of Van Buren’s land reform views, see the Baltimore Sun, 28 July 1848, p.1.

257 Controversy at the Free Soil Convention in Buffalo further muddied the waters. Both upstate New York National Reformer H. H. Van Amringe and Baltimore’s Dr. J. E. Snodgrass had been chosen as delegates to Buffalo, the former by the Industrial Congress and the latter by

“a meeting made up in no inconsiderable proportion of National Reformers, with special reference in part, to the promotion of Land Reform.” Once arrived at Buffalo, however, Van

Amringe accused Snodgrass of taking part in “a preconcert… formed by persons to guide and control the organization and proceedings, and the platform of principles.” The result had been to shut out National Reformers and Liberty Leaguers by dividing the selection of delegates based on Barnburner, Whig, and Liberty Party affiliations. Van Amringe disputed Snodgrass’s claim that this decision had been made on the basis of the National Reformers’ weak showing; in fact,

Van Amringe claimed, the other factions had been fearful of the land reformers’ numerical strength. The result was an ironic repetition of the Baltimore Convention of regular Democrats whose unfair tactics had given rise to the Barnburner revolt in the first place. “Multitudes took part in the convention or came and went,” Van Amringe complained, “without understanding the nature or consequences of the arrangement adopted by the leading persons in the informal committee!”71

Other elements of the land reform movement went even further in denouncing the

Buffalo Convention’s brand of Free Soil. The Philadelphia Times and Keystone described the new Free Soil Party as a “humbug,” explaining to readers that “political jugglers” and

“disappointed wire-pullers” had co-opted the name from “the true ‘Free Soil’ men,” supporters of the National Reform measures “who first used that term.” Chicago land reformer D. S. Curtiss

71 “Buffalo Convention. Reply of Mr. Van Amringe to Dr. Snodgrass” [Van Amringe to Evans, New York, Sept 19, 1848], Young America, 23 September 1848. See also Snodgrass’ letter dated Sept. 3rd. Dr. Snodgrass to the Editor of the National Era, 20 July 1848; Snodgrass, on the other had, informed readers of the Era that he attended to the Congress for the specific purpose of promoting Smith’s nomination, but now feared that the actions of anti-abolition delegates had “destroyed whatever prospects there might have been of a National Reform ticket” in Baltimore.

258 decried Van Buren’s “equivocation,” declaring that “it is inconsistent for a Land Reformer or

Abolitionist to join the Van Buren party…we are contending for great and just principles—for the rights of man... we are not labouring for the elevation of particular men.” The Model Worker, edited by the son of Oneida founder and Gerrit Smith ally Beriah Green, praised the National

Reformers as “the truthful, in contrast to the sham free soilers lately organized under Mr. Van

Buren at Buffalo, (for we can never regard them as free soil men, who advocate the claims of slavery to its unconstitutional and guilty possessions in slave states, or do not recognize the God- given right to all men, to an inalienable homestead on the earth).” Thomas Devyr later recalled what he described as the co-optation of “free soil” by “those imposters... the Buffalo men, and their successors, the Republicans.”72

Nonetheless, anecdotal evidence suggests that many rank-and-file land reformers voted for the new Free Soil Party in 1848. National Reform affiliates and Boston, Philadelphia,

Worcester, and Baltimore all gave their cooperation and support to the Free Soilers, and may have contributed to large Free Soil tallies in New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, northern Ohio, southeastern Wisconsin, and Illinois. Thomas Devyr estimated that “nineteen-twentieths of our men” voted for Van Buren, while J. K. Ingalls later concluded that “most of the Land Reformers were seduced to vote for Van Buren and Adams, cajoled by the false cry of ‘Free Soil, Free

Men,’ and other designing catch words.”73 But the core National Reform leaders, as well as the land reform-dominated Industrial Congress continued to support Gerrit Smith, nominating him as their candidate for President in 1848 and again in 1852.

72 “The True, and the Sham Free Soil Men” [from the Philadelphia Times and Keystone]; “Real and Sham Free Soil” [D.S. Curtiss to Evans, Chicago, Sept 11, 1848, and Evans’ response], Young America, 23 September 1848; “State Convention. To the Liberty Party of the State of New York,” [from the Model Worker]; all in Young America, 23 September 1848; Devyr to Andrew Johnson, 9 December 1859, Johnson-Patterson Papers (quoted in Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 104 n57). 73 Lause, Young America, 93–94; Devyr, Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century, 312; Ingalls, Reminiscences, 26.

259 “Who would have thought it?” exclaimed the Garrisonian Anti-Slavery Bugle, commenting on the nomination of Smith by land and labor reformers. The Bugle’s headline captures the astonishment felt by abolitionists and other observers at what from their perspective seemed a sudden and unexpected turn of events—but which a longer view suggests was the logical outcome of an ideological convergence years in the making.74 Land reform had become the instrument by which that alliance, decades in the making, was finally if imperfectly cemented.

74 Anti-Slavery Bugle, 21 July 1848. The Garrisonian Bugle was writing to criticize the National Reformers’ choice for vice president, Illinois judge William S. Wait, who declined the nomination. The Bugle claimed that Wait had resigned out of opposition to Smith, an “ultra abolitionist,” but failed to offer any evidence for this conclusion, admitting that it had not yet seen Wait’s resignation letter. Niles’ Weekly Register also recorded Wait’s resignation, without offering any reason; see Niles’ Weekly Register LXXIV (July 1848–January 1849):19. Regardless, Wait was replaced by the Michigan abolitionist Charles C. Foote. See fn 38, above; Portrait and Biographical Record of Montgomery and Bond Counties, Illinois (Chicago: Chapman Bros., 1892), 486–87.

260 CHAPTER EIGHT

From Free Soil to Homestead

Free Labor and Free Soil in the Aftermath of 1848

As the reformist fervor of the 1840s ran headlong into the stark political realities of the post-1848 world, National Reform lecturer J.K. Ingalls took stock of the situation. “The movement of 1848 in Europe,” he recalled, “had stirred deeply the sentiment of fraternity and justice of the American people.” But “the fiasco of the free soil party, and the success of the conservative spirit in the election of Taylor and Fillmore, brought on a re-action observed and felt everywhere.” Both land reformers and abolitionists were dismayed by the election of

Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, made possible by the defection of many Democrats to Van

Buren’s Free Soil Party, and by the succession to the presidency after Taylor’s death in July

1850 of Millard Fillmore, who supported the passage of the controversial “Omnibus bill” that led to the infamous Compromise of that year.1

Although a few of the Associationist phalanxes would survive into the 1850s, most had sputtered out within a few years of their founding, along with similar efforts to form communities based on cooperation. In the summer of 1849, George Henry Evans had announced that both the NRA and its mouthpiece, Young America, were facing insurmountable financial difficulties, and the latter ceased publication later that year. Both Evans’ own health and that of his wife, Laura, had suffered from the strains of near-constant political organizing while living in

1 Joshua King Ingalls, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform (Elmira, New York: Gazette Company, 1897), 44–45. On the relationship of American radicals and labor reformers to the 1848 revolutions in Europe, see Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), 82–107; Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and Abolitionists After 1848 (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

261 impoverished circumstances. Laura died in 1850, and Evans retreated to his farm in Granville,

New Jersey, returning to New York only occasionally. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the

“failure of liberty in France, Germany and Hungary” had discouraged the hopes of radicals and republicans in both Europe and America. “My thought was all the while,” Ingalls mused, “upon the question of the land and labor in the world.”2

His finances and his optimism depleted, Ingalls reluctantly decided to temporarily abandon his reform activities and seek “some industrial employment” in the hope of making ends meet. In the fall of 1850, Ingalls went back to work as a journeyman in the New York City manufactory of John H. Keyser, whom he had likely encountered through land and labor reform circles. Keyser, a manufacturer of hot-air furnaces, “metallic marble mantels,” and other heavy- duty metalwork fixtures, was an active National Reformer who played a key role in organizing the New York City Industrial Congress (NYCIC, a spin-off of the National Congress with only tangential ties to that organization).3 Taking up a workmen’s bench at Keyser’s shop on the corner of Cliff and Beekman streets in Manhattan, Ingalls soon found that “the change to a workshop at wages... was disheartening.” Before long, Ingalls had plunged himself back into reform work, discovering in the process a newly militant labor movement, now fed by the tides of immigrants that flooded into New York.

Even in the midst of general prosperity in the North, non-farm manual workers were hard hit by declining wages and real income and rising rents and food prices after 1847, and a

2 Ingalls, Reminiscences, 44–45. 3 Keyser’s path is a curious one. In the decade after the Civil War, Keyser became a millionaire philanthropist after moving into the growing field of supplying plumbing equipment. He remained a persistent advocate of a graduated tax on land before finally abandoning the cause of land reform altogether. Caught up in the Tweed Ring scandal in 1873, he died bankrupt, having come full circuit, it seems, from the idealism of antebellum reform to the cynicism embodied by Gilded Age corruption.

262 “hidden” economic recession between 1853–55.4 Across the city, workers renewed the agitation for hours of labor laws, demanded government-sponsored work programs and affordable housing for workers on empty uptown lots, and organized an “Amalgamated Trades Convention” that, like the General Trades Union of the 1830s, attempted to transcend traditional craft divisions.5

German tailors, led by the revolutionary émigré , were organizing themselves into separate German-language branches of the Journeyman Tailors’ Protective Union to contest the increasing reliance on subcontracted and outsourced labor that made the antebellum clothing industry synonymous with the “sweated trades.”6 A German Central Committee of the United

Trades, comprised of delegates from seventeen Protective Unions numbering 4,500 members, pledged its endorsement of the 1850 Industrial Congress, which in turn supported the tailors’ strike that summer.7 Other German workers founded their own chapter of a land reform association, christened “Jung Amerika” in homage to George Henry Evans’ original.8

4 Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989), 354–62; John R. Commons, ed., History of Labour Vol. I, 564. According to Fogel, non-farm manual workers in the North, particularly the native-born, were hard hit by a “triple crisis” of immigration, declining wages and job conditions, and a wave of epidemic diseases for much of the entire period between 1848 and 1855. 5 The New York City Industrial Congress of 1850 brought together delegates from forty-three “Benevolent, and Protective Societies,” most, but not all, organized by trade. Semi-weekly Tribune, 5 June 1850, in Commons, Documentary History VIII:2, 285). See also Daily Tribune, 7 June 1850 for list of delegates and associations. The “Constitution and Principles” of the NYCIC mirrored that of the National Congress in almost every detail See “Constitution and Principles,” Daily Tribune, 3 July 1850. 6 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 119–29; Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 37–42. 7 New-York Tribune, 26 July 1850, 21 Aug 1850; in Commons, Documentary History VIII:2, 297-98, 308. 8 Hermann Schluter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery: A Chapter from the Social History of America (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1913), 71. Little is known about this German-language branch of the land reform movement, but in January 1846 they held a meeting of the “German Social Reform Association” at National Hall which extended “hearty thanks to our American brothers, the National Reformers,” and promised to advocate “their great principle, the Right of Man to the Soil”; see Young America 10 January 1846. The German land reformers were led , another emigré and veteran of the 1848 Revolution. Although they joined trades unions and land reform organizations in significant numbers, and despite appeals made by Gerrit Smith, George Henry Evans, and others linking Irish woes to monopoly of the soil in Ireland, the Irish remained largely aloof to the appeal of “free soil.” On the Irish and land reform, see “National Reform in Ireland,” National Reform Almanac for 1848, 45-47; Noel Ignatiev How the Irish Became White (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 101–02; Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 165.

263 Despite the straitened circumstances produced by unsanitary and crowded conditions, interethnic, racial, and sectarian rivalries that sometimes escalated into bloody conflicts, the brutal competition of a labor market characterized by downward pressure on wages and an increasing division of labor, there were signs that workingmen in New York and other industrializing cities were continuing to forge connections across racial, ethnic, and international boundaries in the wake of 1848. African-American New Yorkers organized an American League of Colored Laborers, with Frederick Douglass as vice-president, in 1850, and black waiters formed an interracial “Protective Union” with their white counterparts, striking for higher wages in 1853.9 At the National Industrial Congress in Albany in 1851, John C. Bowers, “a colored gentleman from Philadelphia,” arrived as a representative of the Philadelphia Land Association.

Despite opposition to Bowers’ participation from some quarters, the objections were overruled by Evans, Lucius Hine, and other supporters, and Bowers was eventually seated.10 That same year, in Wisconsin, the Free Democrat took to its pages to deny the charge that local land reformers had voted against the election of an African-American delegate to the Albany

Congress. The vote, the Free Democrat clarified, had been 20 to 6 in favor, rather than the reverse; furthermore, even some of the six who rejected the black delegate were said to be “in favor of colored suffrage.”11 Perhaps Wisconsin land reformers had been inspired by abolitionist and National Reformer H. H. Amringe, who had lectured widely in there on the platform of “a free soil as well as personal freedom to all... whether God has painted them white, red, or

9 New York Herald, 14, 16 April, 1853; Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 10–11; Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 242–44. 10 Lause, Young America, 107. Lause quotes the New-York Herald, which may have deliberately exaggerated the level opposition to Bowers being seated at the Congress given its well-known hostility to both abolitionism and agrarian reform. See Herald, 8, 10, 13 June 1851. For sympathetic coverage, see the New-York Tribune, 6, 9, 13, 14 June, as well as Lucius Hine’s letters (as “H”) to the Cincinnati Daily Nonpareil, 11, 13, 16, 17 June 1851. 11 Wisconsin Free Democrat, 25 June 1851.

264 black”—or by their National Reform brethren not far away in Rosendale, Wisconsin, who required that members take a pledge to end discrimination “on account of birth-place or color.”12

Meanwhile, the “spirit of 1848” was kept alive by an injection of immigrants from

Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, and elsewhere, as well as by labor reformers, abolitionists, and others who connected the revolutionary and republican struggles in Europe to those they faced at home.13 When Hungarian independence leader arrived in New York in late 1851, he was greeted with jubilant expressions of solidarity by the American and Foreign

Anti-Slavery Society, the New York City Industrial Congress, and the Brotherhood of the Union, among other organizations. In a missive to Kossuth, NYCIC chairman and Printer’s Union president K. Arthur Bailey laid out the entire land reform program before the Hungarian hero.

Likewise, when Bailey addressed “a delegation of working men and free land advocates” who had turned out to greet Kossuth in person, he drew a parallel between the lost cause in Hungary and “the disposition of the public lands... the landless condition of our workers, and its effect in depressing the wages, and depriving working men of opportunities, and homes.”14

The new movement was crystallized in New York by the formation of the New York City

Industrial Congress in 1850, which brought together workers from forty-three different trades, the largest such effort since the 1830s. Organized by figures including Bailey, Keyser (who served as Corresponding Secretary), Carpenter’s Union president Benjamin Price, and land

12 Lause, Young America, 79–80. See Van Amringe’s regularly-published column on National Reform in the Wisconsin Freeman, especially 19, 26 January and 22 March, 1848. 13 On the role of abolitionists in supporting the republican and revolutionary movements of 1848 as well as transatlantic radicalism more broadly, see W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016). 14 New York Herald, 10 December 1851. Early the next year, while Kossuth was still in the United States, the National Industrial Congress sent a memorial to Congress urging the suspension of diplomatic ties with Louis Napoleon, the President of the Second Republic established after the 1848 Revolution who would shortly proclaim himself Emperor. New York Daily Times, 6 January 1852.

265 reformer William V. Barr, the NYCIC was less a vehicle for land reform and more of a forum for trade unionists than its national predecessor had been. As had been the case with the National

Congresses, the mixture of trades unionists, employers, and middle-class reformers sometimes led to tensions. At its inaugural meeting in 1850, Bricklayers’ and Plasterers’ Union delegate

McCloskey denounced Barr’s land reform platform as a “humbug” and moved that the Congress be adjourned. But other trades unionists, citing the presence of “all the trades were represented there,” defeated McCloskey’s motion and went on to accept Barr’s speeches, giving the “right to soil” a prominent place in its constitution.15 The resulting constitution, although essentially similar to that of the National Industrial Congress, differing in two main particulars: its

“Preamble” emphasized the “hostility” between Capital and Labor, and its articles specified that delegates be elected from “Associations of Industrials, Mechanics, and Laborers... who must be members of the organizations they represent.”16

Even as the NYCIC demanded the restoration to the laborer of “the full product of his toil,” however, it declared itself dedicated to “devising means to reconcile the interests of Labor and Capital,” temporarily deranged by the “hostility” created by the current economic climate.

Along with the more capacious criteria for membership in the National Congress, which had enabled the inclusion, at least on occasion, of women and African Americans, the NYCIC’s

Preamble dispensed with sweeping statements about the “Rights of Man” or Fourierist language

15 Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 67–71. The City Congresses originated as a collaboration between Donald C. Henderson (Tribune), John Keyser (NRA), and union leaders– see Zahler 70-71, n27 and passim. 16 In the debate over adoption of the Constitution that took place at the NYCIC’s inaugural session, the inclusion of “Benevolent” societies or other organizations not composed of “laboring men” was a hotly-contested issue. Charles Crux of the Journeyman Upholsterers’ Society expressed fear that the phrase could be interpreted to include Freemasons, Odd-Fellows, or temperance associations, while other delegates attacked the inclusion of the “Church of Humanity,” a reformist organization apparently popular with workers from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Eleventh Ward of Manhattan. The Tribune thought such questions were “trivial,” and regretted the “acrimonious feeling” they caused. Similarly, it condemned the effort, led by Cornelius McCloskey of the Bricklayers’ and Plasterers’ Association, to revive the General Trades Union of the 1830s, viewing the NYCIC as a preferable form of a “central organization.” New-York Daily Tribune, 3 July, 1850; quoted in Commons, Documentary History Vol. VIII:2, 290–96.

266 about the formation of a “New Moral Government.”17 Nonetheless, delegates from organizations like the secretive Brotherhood of the Union as well as the New York branch of the “Church of

Humanity” (inspired by the work of French social thinker Auguste Comte) were suffered to remain, as were “middle class” reformers like Greeley; Greeley’s Tribune continued to give the

NYCIC generous coverage throughout the decade.18 Meanwhile, the continued salience of the connection—in the minds of conservatives, at least—between labor reform and antislavery was underscored by the proslavery editor James Gordon Bennett, who referred to the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society held in New York on May 7th, 1850, as “the Annual

Congress of Fanatics—The Disunionists, Socialists, Fourierists, Communists, and other

Abolitionists.”19

The Harmony Division was hardly alone in calling for a new political party at the beginning of the 1850s. In 1846, George Henry Evans had predicted that there would soon exist

“but two parties, the great Republican Party of Progress and little Tory Party of Holdbacks.”20 By

1852, it had become evident to Evans and many other former radical Democrats that the

Democratic Party with which they had so long been associated had veered closer to the latter rather than the former description. In June of that year, Ohio congressman Samuel Lewis issued

17 While it is far from clear, as labor historians were once apt to argue, whether such criteria excluded employers in favor of wage workers, let alone whether the formation of the NYCIC heralded the advent of “bread and butter unionism,” it does appear that more “middle-class” reform elements, such as those representing Fourierists, abolitionists, or temperance reformers, were brushed aside in favor of organizations composed exclusively of employees. Whether this represented a further step towards labor “radicalism,” however, is dubious. John Commons and historians of his school made this argument most forcefully in Commons et al., eds., History of Labour in the United States and A Documentary History of American Industrial Society. 18 The Brotherhood of the Union was a semi-secret organization that combined support for land and labor reform measures with rituals and an organizational structure similar to Freemasonry. Started in Philadelphia by the labor agitator and novelist George Lippard, it spread throughout the Mid-Atlantic states during the 1850s; according to Jamie Bronstein, Albert Brisbane, John Commerford, J.K. Ingalls, and possibly, George Henry Evans became members. See Mark A. Lause, Young America and A Secret Society History of the Civil War (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 21– 36; Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 238–241. 19 Quoted in John Strausbaugh, City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War (New York and Boston: Twelve Publishing, 2016), 78. 20 Young America, 21 March, 1846.

267 a call for “the friends of the principles declared” at the Free Soil convention in Buffalo, consisting of “Delegates of the Free Democracy.” When the newly-christened Free Democratic

Party convened in Pittsburgh that August, it invited the National Industrial Congress, then meeting in Washington, D.C., to send such delegates. With Wisconsin abolitionist Charles

Durkee at the helm, the NIC obliged, but also expressed its own vision for a third party, “the party of masses, the Labor Party.” Although such a party never materialized, the leaders of the

NIC believed that workers’ increasing awareness of their exploitation by parties that represented capital meant that “conscious or unconscious of its own existence, it is.”21

The rise of the Free Democratic and Republican parties in the 1850s coincided with, and to some extent grew out of, the demise of the Free Soil and Liberty Party coalitions of the late

1840s. In these same years, having failed to accomplish electoral success either in New York

City or elsewhere, the National Reform Association abandoned whatever aspirations it may have had to function as an independent third party, even one whose purpose was merely to act as a spoiler by taking votes away from the two major parties. But even as the NRA declined as an organization, its influence continued to be felt as immigration and economic uncertainty exacerbated the labor crisis in the eastern cities and westward expansion created fresh fields for the sowing of agrarian ideas, whether in their radical or Jacksonian guises. J.K. Ingalls recalled that the NRA kept up a steady stream of “propagandism” throughout the first half of the decade, continuing to interrogate candidates and attempting to direct their votes accordingly. National

Reform leaders like Ingalls, as well as local branches of the organization, now turned their attention to petitioning Congress; particularly between the years of 1850 and 1852, hundreds of

National Reform petitions containing thousands of signatures were sent from at twenty-three

21 Schuyler C. Marshall, “The Free Democratic Convention of 1852,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 22:2 (April, 1955): 146–167.

268 states and the District of Columbia.22 Ingalls later credited this petition campaign, which he was heavily involved in organizing, with the passage of the Homestead Act. If such a claim contains more than a touch of exaggeration, it also warrants deeper consideration of the land reform movement’s role in catalyzing the unstable coalition around antislavery, homesteads, and protectionist economic policies that formed the basis of the Republican Party’s appeal to northern voters in the 1850s.

Between 1848 and 1854, the conflicts stemming from the struggle over the status of slavery in the territories and its future in the nation intersected inescapably with the aims of working-class land reformers, forcing them to confront the reality of a newly-assertive and aggressively expansionist Slave Power. As the Lowell Voice of Industry, writing during congressional debates on the territorial status of Oregon in July 1848, put it,

There is now but one issue. Either slavery must have full liberty and sweep, to expand itself in infinity, or else it must meet, in fell encounter with Death. You cannot touch a single question of general policy in which slavery does not get some mortal thrust. It can’t be avoided. Slavery must be extinguished... We go for direct and internicine [sic] war with the monster; for utter extinction. If this cannot be done at once, let us at least wall him round, with the blazing bulwarks of Free States.23

At the same time, a more cautious version of land reform began to make its way into the political mainstream, adopted by politicians from an array of partisan and sectional affiliations who hoped to mitigate some of the worst effects of the spread of wage labor and dependence on markets and stave off radical or even insurrectionary approaches. Much as the surprising show of

22 “Appendix A,” in Mark A. Lause, Young America, 139–55. The petitions can be found in the records of the Thirty- first and Thirty-second Congress at the Legislative Research Office of the National Archives, Washington, D.C. Although Lause found memorials emanating from as far south as Alabama, the vast majority originated in the Middle Atlantic and Middle West states, particularly New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. A significant number came from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but few if any from other New England states. 23 “The Oregon Question,” Voice of Industry 27 July 1848.

269 strength made by the Republican Party in the election of 1856 would signal to William H.

Seward that antislavery had “at length” become “a respectable element in politics,” by the mid-

1850s there were signs that land reform, once considered a politically-impossible project of utopians and agrarians, had become “respectable.” The newfound respectability of both antislavery and land reform would pose new dilemmas for proponents of each. But regardless of its implications for the future of labor, enslaved or free, the historic intersection of land reform and antislavery in the 1850s would dramatically transform the politics of the antebellum North, forever foreclosing some alternatives while pointing the way towards radical possibilities for others.

Land Reform Moves West: National Reform in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Beyond

For most of the second half the 1840s, the land reform movement was primarily a phenomenon of the eastern cities. Originating in New York City, it underwent a trial by fire in the Anti-rent counties of upstate New York before establishing key bases of support in the manufacturing cities and towns of New England, the radical artisan hotbed of Philadelphia, and in urban centers as far south as Richmond, Virginia. But even as the NRA began to decline as an organized political movement in the East after 1848, it continued to gain adherents and momentum in the burgeoning western cities of Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee, and among many humbler towns and pioneer settlements of the Old Northwest and Middle West. Central to

Evans’ strategy had been to effect land reform legislation “by the votes of the small farmers, who were the majority” in the North and throughout the country.24 By the end of the 1840s, the NRA claimed to have some fifty auxiliary associations, not only in the industrializing eastern cities of

24 “Industrial Congress,” Niles’ National Register, July 10, 1847, p. 296.

270 Albany, Rochester, Philadelphia, Boston, Lowell, and several other cities in Massachusetts, but in Pittsburgh; Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; Wheeling, Virginia; New

Harmony, Indiana; and Milwaukee, and Mineral Point, Wisconsin. It also claimed that more than one hundred newspapers were “committed to the National Reform measures, in whole or in part,” among which it counted not only the Tribune and Elizur Wright’s Boston Daily

Chronotype, but also publications in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Salem, and McConnellsville, Ohio;

Chicago and Chester, Illinois.25 Perhaps in recognition of the growing importance of both land reform and wage labor to the West, National Industrial Congresses were held in Cincinnati in

1849, in Chicago in 1850, and in Cleveland in 1855.

Cincinnati, on the other side of the Northwest Ordinance’s dividing line between free and slave states, had long been a magnet for artisans as well as for animal products, grain, iron, and other manufactured goods traveling by river and canal. Cincinnati workers had been particularly hard-hit by the Panic of 1837, and by the 1850s, “Porkopolis” was already beginning to lose ground to Chicago as a meatpacking center and depot for western grain and other goods. During the winter of 1847-48, Cincinnati Iron Moulders formed a cooperatively-run iron foundry, the

Journeyman Moulders’ Union Foundry, in response to hard times and unemployment.26 Inspired by the cooperative approach developed by the Iron Moulders, local stovemaker Josiah Warren devised a system of “Labor Notes,” in which workingmen could exchange their labor in lieu of currency at the “Time Store” at the corner of Cincinnati’s Fifth and Elm streets. In 1847, Warren reorganized on “labor for labor” principles the former Fourierist settlement of Utopia, Ohio, which he purchased from John O. Wattles, another reformer with connections to the NRA. In

25 National Reform Almanac for 1848 (New York: Office of Young America, 1848), 44–45. The NRA claimed to have organizations in “about” twenty states by this time. YA shared office with the True Sun; a briefly-extant alternative to the conservative New York Sun organized by striking typesetters. 26 “’Industrial Harmony.’–The Cincinnati Molders,” in Commons, Doc Hist, Vol. VIII, Part 2, 309–14.

271 1851, Warren determined to apply these ideas in a mutualist settlement back East, establishing the “Modern Times” settlement on Long Island with aid from Associationist Albert Brisbane and the proto-anarchist .27

Cincinnati had also been an early center of land-reform activity. Josiah Warren had been a National Reform supporter, and John Pickering, the National Reform leader who authored the influential Working Man’s Political Economy, was based there. In 1848 Pickering took the lead in organizing a petition signed by 228 Cincinnatians in favor of laying out and distributing the public lands to actual settlers.28 Pickering was also chosen by a group of local reformers to draft a document providing a working theory for the unification of various reform efforts, to be presented at the 1850 Industrial Congress at Chicago. The resulting document contained the usual denunciations of so-called “fragmentary reforms,” but also declared in favor of women’s equality and against slaveholder expansion. Slavery, the Industrial Congress proclaimed that year, “cannot exist without inevitably producing the destruction of a nation which permits it.”29

A new tome published by Pickering that same year framed the familiar National Reform refrain in the context of post-1848 internationalism and the new urgency provided by the contest over slavery in the territories. The Friend of Man, Being the Principles of National or Land

Reform, combined detailed expositions of the three main NRA planks of Freedom of the Public

Lands, Homestead Exemption, and Land Limitation, along with a set of “Slanders Refuted” and

27 “The Plan for the Cincinnati Labour for Labour Store,” Mechanics’ Free Press, 9 August, 1828, in Commons, Doc Hist, Vol. V, 124–129. Although Warren’s Long Island community was known as “The Socialist Community of Modern Times,” Warren’s views diverged widely from Owenite and Fourierist “socialism,” advocating the sovereignty of the individual and the rejection of communitarian principles or indeed, any recognition of the individual’s obligation to society. Land at Utopia and Modern Times was owned individually, with goods and services purchased by labor notes. On Wattles’ connection to the NRA, see “Letter from John O. Wattles,” National Reform Almanac for 1848. 28 “Petition of John Pickering, John White, James Gibson and 228 other citizens of Cincinnati praying Congress to cause the public lands to be laid out in tracts and to be occupied without charge by landless persons,” 31 January, 1848, Records of the 30th Congress, National Archives. 29 Lause, Young America, 104–05; New York Daily Tribune, 12, 13, 15, 17 June, 1850. Little biographical information about Pickering is available, but a “J. Pickering” is described as the Mechanics’ Institute librarian in Charles Cist, Cincinnati in 1841: Its Early Annals and Future Prospects (Cincinnati, 1841), 133.

272 “Objections Answered.” The familiar arguments against land monopoly were now subtly re- framed to meet the ideological demands of a reshaped post-1848 political environment. In addition to alleviating the pressure on rents and wages created by the oversupply of labor in crowded cities, Pickering now suggested, land reform would “have a tendency to weaken, and... finally break up the despotic governments of Europe, by drawing from them the most industrious, energetic and valuable part of their populations”; simultaneously, it would prevent the “the falling despots of Europe, from becoming the owners of our soil.” Elsewhere, the pamphlet praised California’s new free-soil constitution as “a signal triumph of the principles we advocate.” As for slavery, whereas Pickering had earlier been an enthusiastic employer of the

“wages slave” metaphor, he now largely dropped the language of wage slavery and deployed such rhetorical comparisons in a somewhat different sense. The giving away of land to the landless, Pickering now suggested, didn’t detract from the freedom of landowners any more than the abolition of slavery would detract from that of the slave who had purchased his freedom. The expansion of free labor, Pickering now insisted, was in itself an unqualified good.30

Even more persuasive was Lucius Hine. The young and dashing Hine had studied law at the University of Cincinnati before adopting land reform and publishing his forceful but respectful argument against William Lloyd Garrison’s rejection of political and constitutional methods as a means to advance the cause of the enslaved. His Lecture on Garrisonian Politics

(1853) also contained strident pleas for recognition of the rights of women and free blacks

(describing the discriminatory laws of Ohio and other northern states as “treachery to the spirit of our institutions”), as well as one of the period’s most original arguments in favor of an

30 National Reform Association of Cincinnati [John Pickering], The Friend of Man; Being the Principles of National or Land Reform; Clearly Stated, Together With Answers to the Various Objections that Have Been Urged Against It (Cincinnati: William McDiarmid, 1850), 3–7, 11. Specifically, Pickering argued that just as no individual slave who had purchased his own freedom would begrudge his fellow slave in the event that all were suddenly set free, so no landowner could rightfully complain that the Public Lands were be given away free of charge, since the benefit to others would not detract from his freedom.

273 antislavery interpretation of the Constitution. Hine, who published a series of pamphlets on

“Political and ” throughout the decade, read Pickering’s reform manifesto at the

1850 Industrial Congress, presided over that year by another westerner, the Fourierist and founder of the Wisconsin Phalanx, Warren B. Chase. From 1852 to 1853 Hine traveled throughout Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana lecturing on “Land Reform and Free Schools,” holding some 350 meetings in all. “In no place,” he reported, “have I failed to find staunch friends of Land Reform in its most radical import.” Using Cincinnati as a base, Hine would lecture on an average of nearly 200 times a year over the next ten years. Later, he resurfaced as a defender of Abraham Lincoln and a spokesperson for the various workingmen’s organizations that coalesced after the war.31

Land reformers joined forces with antislavery advocates in Ohio, where Liberty Party leaders participated in that state’s “Free Territory” convention, and in Michigan, where the Free

Democratic party demanded that public lands be “gratuitously distributed in limited quantities to actual settlers.” Illinoisans, who had formed an NRA auxiliary as early as 1845, organized a

“National Reform Democratic State Convention” with the goal of showing that “the sons of toil” there were “acting in concert with those of other States” in the “great movement” then underway.32 Iowa Free Soilers, denouncing the proslavery positions of both Democrats and

Whigs as “anti-Democratic, anti-Christian, and untrue,” endorsed the Free Soil Party ticket as

“the only political party who propose and sustain any great and good measures of National

Reform in the present day.” The Iowans nominated former Democrat John P. Hale on the grounds that his efforts on the Homestead bill then pending in Congress “entitled him to the

31 L. A. (Lucius Alonzo) Hine, A Lecture on Garrisonian Politics Before the Western Philosophical Institute, Delivered in Cincinnati, Sunday, April 24th, 1853 (Cincinnati: Longley and Brother, 1853); L. A. Hine to the New-York Daily Tribune, 1 March 1853, in Commons, Doc Hist Vol. VIII, Part 2, 60-61; Lause, Young America, 63, 104, 113, 130–33. See also Dayton Kelley, “L.A. Hine, Prophet of the Rights of Man” [manuscript biography, n.d.], Ohio History Connection. 32 “A Free Soil—Progress of the Cause,” Young America 5 July 1845; Wisconsin Free Democrat, 31 September 1851.

274 gratitude and respect of the laboring classes.” Indiana, Wisconsin, and California all incorporated homestead exemption into their state constitutions; in Indiana, Whig and future Radical

Republican Schulyer Colfax led the push for exemption and endorsed the concept of freedom of the public lands.33

In the Golden State, David C. Broderick, the political leader of a group of expatriate pugilists, fortune-seekers, and political toughs from the lower wards of Manhattan formed the nucleus of an unlikely antislavery coalition. Broderick, an Irish-American stonecutter, former

Locofoco, and “Spartan gang” companion of Mike Walsh, became the leader of the California

Free Soilers against the “Hunker” faction of the California Democracy. The sensationalism and deeply partisan nature of contemporary news coverage, often reflected in early biographies of

Broderick, make it difficult to evaluate the sincerity of his antislavery and free-labor convictions.

But in the state legislature, he opposed the passage of a bill barring the emigration of African

Americans to the state, and as a U. S. Senator, Broderick’s denunciations of Stephen Douglas’s version of and the proslavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas won him the affections of Republicans and the enmity of Hunker Democrats, who helped unseat him in

1858. Broderick paid the ultimate price a few years later, when he was killed by California’s proslavery former state Supreme Court Justice David S. Terry in a duel.34 Southerners had good reason to fear the triumph of Free Soil in California; as South Carolina secessionist Langdon

33 “Free Soil Ratification Meeting,” National Era, 30 September 1852; , “The Emergence of Homestead Exemption in the United States: Accommodation and Resistance to the Market Revolution,” Journal of American History Vol. 80, No. 2 (Sept., 1993): 487; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 98 n44. 34 “Sketch of the Life and Political Career of the Late D. C. Broderick,” New York Times, 25 February 1860. Terry blamed Broderick for his defeat in state elections in 1859. See Journal of the Senate, 1857, 1 Sess. 372-73; and esp. speech in 35th Congress, 1st session, Cong Globe, 191–93. See also David A. Williams, David C. Broderick: A Political Portrait (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1969); Tamara Venit, A Squatter’s Republic (Unpublished diss., Stanford 2008).

275 Cheves protested at the Nashville Convention of 1850, a Free Soil victory there might pave the way for the complete abolition of slavery in time.35

But it was in Wisconsin that the alliance between antislavery and land reform arguably bore the most fruit. After attaining statehood in 1848, abolitionists and land reformers there united to elect the abolitionist and Free Soiler Charles Durkee to the House of Representatives,

Homestead champion and National Reform presidential candidate Isaac P. Walker to the Senate, and Fourierist Warren B. Chase to the state legislature. The brand of land reform promoted by the NRA had a solid foundation in Wisconsin. As early as 1837, pioneers in the territory had sent petitions asking that public lands be reserved for actual settlers. A decade later, land reformers led by Chase and the NRA’s H.H. Van Amringe won the inclusion of a homestead exemption clause in the state’s constitution. Even the conservative Wisconsin Argus, although it believed homestead exemption to be a form of “appropriation by law [of] the property of individuals for the relief of the poor,” conceded that the protection of “moderate” exemptions of debtor’s property from seizure was “a principle of government from which but very few will dissent.”36

Van Amringe, in his capacity the official lecturer of the National Industrial Congress, traveled widely throughout the state beginning in 1847, and local land reformers successfully interrogated local politicians on their support for land reform measures, extracting pledges from candidates in 1848 and again in 1849. The state Free Soil Convention held at Janesville in the prior year officially adopted the three National Reform planks alongside the Buffalo Free Soil platform. Indeed, the prospects for land reform in Wisconsin looked so promising that leading

35 John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Vol. 2: The Coming of the Civil War 1850–1861 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29. 36 Wisconsin Argus, 16 November 1847; quoted in Lena London, “Homestead Exemption in the Wisconsin Constitution,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (December, 1948), 184.

276 New York National Reformer Alvan E. Bovay, the organization’s secretary, relocated there in

1851.37

Wisconsin land reformers also had an able mouthpiece in the form of the American

Freeman (later the Wisconsin Freeman, and afterwards the Milwaukee Free Democrat), edited by another transplant, Sherman M. Booth. Known as a “radical,” “old-time abolitionist,” the western New York-born Booth had become involved in abolitionism as a Yale student assigned to teach imprisoned Africans from the Amistad rebellion how to read, and subsequently helped organize the Liberty Party in Connecticut. He arrived in Wisconsin in 1848, the year of

Wisconsin’s admission into the Union. With an assistant, Ichabod Codding, he established the

Freeman in Waukesha, but soon moved to Milwaukee and changed the new paper’s name, becoming its sole proprietor. At first ’s editor was chary of the Free Soil movement, regarding it as an abandonment of Liberty Party principles. But after Booth and Durkee were elected as delegates to the 1848 Free Soil Convention in Buffalo (with instructions to “sustain no candidates except those who are not only pledged against the extension of slavery, but are also committed to the policy of abolishing it”), Booth went on to play an important role both in

Buffalo, where he helped to shape the new party’s platform, and in Wisconsin, where he became a vocal advocate of both the Free Soil party and the more radical version of “free soil” espoused by Wisconsin National Reformers.38

In Milwaukee, Booth helped to organize a Free Soil league that included advocates of both reforms, while German immigrant A. H. Biefeld publicized the campaign in the Milwaukee

Volksfreund, hoping to gain adherents among the city’s large population of German-speaking

37 Merle Curti, “Isaac P. Walker: Reformer in Mid-Century Politics,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 34:1 (Autumn, 1950), 4–5; Lause, Young America, 63, 87; New-York Tribune, May 1 1849. 38 Theodore Clarke Smith, “The Free Soil Party in Wisconsin,” Wisconsin State Historical Society Publications 42 (December, 1894): 112–14, 150; Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 215, 250.

277 laborers. The result was that Wisconsin gave 10,423 votes for Van Buren—more than a quarter of the votes it cast in 1848, and a greater percentage of Free Soil votes than any state except New

York and Massachusetts—and elected Charles Durkee and I. P. Walker to Congress. Even

Hunker Democrats and Whigs were forced to take Free Soil positions in Wisconsin, an outcome that historian Theodore Clarke Smith thought made the state “more nearly anti-slavery than any similar area in the Union.”39

Booth’s Freeman, which later changed its name to the Free Democrat after the emergence of the breakaway party of the same name, also became an enthusiastic adopter of the land reform measures promoted by the National Reformers. It encouraged readers to travel to the

Industrial Congresses in Chicago in 1850 (presided over by Warren B. Chase) and Washington,

D. C. in 1852 (presided over by Charles Durkee), and published notices of local National Reform lectures and meetings. At one of the latter, held before an overflow crowd at Madison’s

Assembly Hall, attendees listened to former New York Anti-renter and official NIC lecturer H.

H. Van Amringe address “a full house on the subject of Free Soil.” According to Booth’s correspondent, Van Amringe “completely annihilated the arguments” against land limitation, citing Blackstone to prove that “all titles to land were exclusively and entirely the creatures of statute law, and subject to all or any legislative action which the law-makers think proper to make.” The Free Democrat acknowledged that “the principles involved in those questions we unhesitatingly approve”—with good reason, since many of the same principles applied to the question of government intervention over slavery in the territories. But Booth also took National

Reformers to task for failing to live up to the antislavery implications of their creed, splitting with local NRA leader Elmore after he attempted to lead followers back into the arms of the

39 Rayback, Free Soil, 282.

278 conservative Hunker Democrats, and excoriating Wisconsin’s Senator Walker for failing (in the eyes of Booth and other abolitionists) to live up to his promise to defend the Wilmot Proviso. In

May 1849, Booth republished an article from the like-minded True Democrat, chiding National

Reformers for failing to pay attention to the importance of measures like abolishing slavery in

Washington, D.C. The article agreed that a land limitation law would be “a blow would be struck at the very root of all human slavery,” but accused National Reformers of “an inconsistency... that operate[s] as a drawback to true, practical progress.” “If we can not kill the root” of land monopoly, the True Democrat opined, “we should not in our indignation, refuse to lop off its branches.”40

Wisconsin land reformers came close to enacting a state bill on land limitation in 1851.

The bill, which would have limited the amount of landholdings to 320 acres or two one-acre city lots, was approved by a committee headed by local land reformers, who emphasized the plight of

“workingmen, born without an inheritance of land or money, [and] thrown into an over-crowded market for labor.” The bill received the tacit support of Governor Nelson Dewey, and an initial vote in the State Assembly passed 43 to 15. Van Amringe organized mass meetings of

Milwaukee laborers in support of its passage, but conservatives and business interests soon rose up in opposition to the “land limitation humbug,” labeling the measure an “incipient crusade against the rights of property” and hosting their own “anti-agrarian” meetings. The state’s attorney general then declared limitation unconstitutional, and, after an unfavorable report from the judiciary committee, the measure failed by a vote of 27 to 37. Notably, however, even the

“anti-agrarians” defended their position in terms of the labor theory of property, defining the

40 Wisconsin Free Democrat, 3 September 1851, 7 February 1849, 26 February 1851; “Young America—National Reformers,” (from Osh-kosh True Democrat), Wisconsin Free Democrat 2 May 1849.

279 latter as “a right which society creates for the recompense of Labor... with us all property is simply industry rewarded with its just fruits.”41

Local land reformers, although smarting from the defeat of land limitation, may have also found a silver lining in the election of Charles Durkee to the House, and the re-election of Henry

Dodge (Wisconsin’s first territorial governor and a consistent supporter of land reform measures) and Isaac P. Walker to the Senate that year. For much of the first half of the 1850s, Walker would become the leading advocate in Congress of land reform, by that time generally referred to as “homestead reform,” or simply “Homestead.” These efforts would earn him the devotion of many National Reformers, who repeatedly nominated him as their candidate for President between 1850 and 1852. Durkee became a leading opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act in the

House; just weeks after he had presided over the 1852 Industrial Congress, he gave a ringing speech in which he denied that the 1850 Compromise represented a “final” settlement of the slavery issue and decried the Fugitive Act’s “unrelenting war against the African race” (in 1855, having switched his allegiance to the Republicans, Durkee would fill Walker’s Senate seat).42

Over the next decade, some of the most important political champions of both Homestead and antislavery would emerge from the same plains and prairies that had spawned homestead exemption and land limitation, the Freeman, and men like Durkee, Dodge, and Walker.43

The Compromise of 1850 and the Rise of the “Free Democracy”

41 Smith, “The Free Soil Party in Wisconsin,”114; “Interrogatories to Candidates for State Offices,” Wisconsin Free Democrat 24 Oct 1849; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy, 1829–1862 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 92–93, 128; Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette, quoted in Commons, Documentary History VIII:2, 57. 42 The Fugitive Slave Law, Etc. Speech of Charles Durkee, of Wisconsin, in the House of Representatives, August 6, 1852, on the Fugitive Slave Law as a ‘Finality’ and the Present Position of Parties, (Washington, D.C., 1852). 43 The National Reformers may have popularized the term “homestead” in the sense of inalienable, limited tracts of land, just as they helped coin the term “free soil.” The Philadelphia Times and Keystone explained to its readers in 1848 that “these farms and lots the National Reformers call Homesteads.”

280 Reverberations from the debacle of the Compromise of 1850 were felt immediately among some sectors of the northern population—most onerously, by free blacks, who now found their freedom threatened in new and ominous ways by the Fugitive Slave Act. The initial response from land and labor reformers was initially muted, with some labor organizations explicitly disavowing any participation in the controversy over slavery.44 Like many northerners, workers who considered themselves agnostic on slavery no doubt hoped that the Compromise portended a “final settlement” of “the slave question.” But as the implications of the

Compromise measures, particularly the hated Fugitive Act, became apparent, land reformers and other workingmen’s organizations began to respond. Like northerners generally, white workingmen resented what they perceived as their transformation into “slave catchers,” dragooning ordinary citizens into a national dragnet for fugitive slaves. In Massachusetts in

1850, a convention of workingmen presided over by Appleton Fay declared that “giving up our fellow-workingmen to the Slave Hunters, at the South, dispensing with the trial by Jury, and making it criminal to do good to our fellow-workingmen, is an infamous act, fit only to be trampled under the feet of every lover of Liberty and Justice.”45 Another group of Massachusetts

“Friends of Industrial Reform” passed a resolution declaring that the Fugitive Act was not

“binding in law or conscience on the people, and ought to be resisted, if necessary, to death, by every friend to our country, to humanity, and to justice,” and Elizur Wright and ten-hours leader

John C. Cluer both faced prosecution for resisting the law, Wright for aiding Shadrach Minkins

44 John R. Commons et al., eds. History of Labour in the United States, Vol. II (New York: Macmillan Company, 1918), 619. Commons cites Schlüter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery in contending that labor’s voice in the slavery controversy was “conspicuous by its absence” during the period 1850–52, and indeed, the publications and pronouncements of labor organizations reflect this to some extent. But both Commons and Schlüter cite only scattered evidence to support this point; a closer look suggests that, if labor antislavery was at a low ebb during this time, this was partly due to the related phenomenon described at the beginning of this chapter, which presented something of a crisis for organized labor. In any event, the notion that a nascent antislavery was lurking under the surface during these years is supported by its dramatic re-emergence in 1854. 45 Lause, Young America, 115.

281 to escape in 1851, and Cluer during the famed case.46 In 1851 and again in 1852, the New York City Industrial Congress reaffirmed its “hostility” to the Act and urged its repeal

(in the latter year the organization cited the case of Horace Preston, a fugitive from Baltimore who had been apprehended in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that April, as an egregious example of the

Fugitive Act’s implications). In the latter year, Philadelphia iron monger John Sheddon,

Brotherhood of the Union leader George Lippard, and National Reformer August Duganne also spoke out against the Fugitive Law.47 Somewhat more belatedly, in 1854, a group of signatories in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, led by the NRA’s Lewis Masquerier, expressed remorse about the fact that northern workers had “submitted to the degredation [sic] and meanness of becoming slave catchers.” The rancor created by the Fugitive Act, the petition went on, only “proves that the public conscience of the free states is outraged by the peculiar institution, and that the only remedy of the evil, is its ultimate abolition.”48

In New York, the remaining core of the National Reform Association debated the best course of action given the new political realities of the growing salience of slavery and the continued acquiescence of the two major parties on issues of land and slaveholder expansion.

Much as they had in 1848, when National Reformers found themselves torn between the faint promise of Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party and the “sham free soil” of the Buffalo Free Soilers, in

46 Ibid.; U.S. vs. John C. Cluer, U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts, Record Group 21: Records of the District Courts of the United States, 1685–2009, Case Files, 1790–1911, National Archives. 47 National Era, 15 July, 14 October 1852. 48 “Proceedings of the State Convention of the friends of Industrial Reform,” New-York Weekly Tribune, 26 Oct 1850, 329; New York Herald, 7, 15 April 1852; “Memorial for the Support of Liberty!” July 4th, 1854. The Massachusetts group’s anti- Fugitive Law resolution was sandwiched between others calling for the abolition of “the system of wages slavery” and denouncing the specious Land Bounty Act of 1850, in which land grants were to ex-soldiers, as “got up by speculators to traffic in the people’s inheritance.” A recent account of the Preston case can be found in Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), 133–34.

282 1852 the group found itself divided over the efficacy of supporting third-party candidates.49 In some ways, the land reformers’ choice might have seemed obvious. After the passage of the

Compromise of 1850, elements of the old Free Soil Party had reorganized under the banner of the Free Democratic Party, or Free Democracy, a name chosen to reflect its distinction from the old Democratic Party, now widely seen as being captive to the Slave Power. The new party had invited delegates from the Industrial Congress to its convention in Pittsburgh, and in New York, a city convention of “Independent Democrats,” after passing the requisite resolution on land reform, elected a delegation consisting of National Reformers William West, Lewis Masquerier, and William J. Young to attend. At the Pittsburgh convention, land reformers rubbed shoulders with abolitionists Joshua Giddings, , Frederick Douglass, Charles Francis Adams,

Owen Lovejoy, and (the Massachusetts Senator known as the “Natick cobbler” for his humble origins). Convening on August 11th, 1852, only a day after the Homestead bill’s defeat in the Senate, the convention’s majority report added to resolutions denouncing slavery and the 1850 Compromise a plank declaring that “the public lands of the United States belong to the people, and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust... [and] granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers.”50

But the majority report’s positions on both slavery and land reform failed to satisfy the backers of the minority report, read by Gerrit Smith and National Reformer Young. Although, unlike the 1848 Free Soil platform, the convention’s majority report did not deny the authority of

Federal Government to intervene in preventing the spread of slavery in the territories, neither did it explicitly recognize the constitutional authority of Congress to do so. The minority report’s

49 The path taken by the National Reform Association becomes harder to follow at this point; Young America stopped publishing in 1849, although their activities in the early 1850s were covered by the (largely hostile) New York Herald and the (somewhat more sympathetic) Tribune. 50 Quoted in Helene Zahler, Eastern Workingmen 100, n48; see also Schuyler C. Marshall, “The Free Democratic Convention of 1852,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 22:2 (April, 1955), 146–167.

283 position went further, characterizing slavery as an “atrocious and abominable” form of “piracy” and declaring it “entirely incapable of legislation”—that is to say, illegal. The Fugitive Law,

Smith and Young avowed, should not only be defied but should be “trample[d] under foot.” As far as the public lands were concerned, the minority report pushed for the recognition that the

“right to the soil is the right of all men.” In the scrum of debate over the “legality” of slavery and that followed, land reform emerged as the middle ground on which both sides could meet;

Sheldon of Pennsylvania thought it could serve as an “entering wedge” in bringing about the demise of slavery. In the end, the convention adopted not only the majority report’s acceptance of the three National Reform planks, but added a resolution submitted by Booth of Michigan affirming a “natural right” to a portion of the soil, which was adopted almost unanimously. The convention then nominated former Liberty Party candidate John P. Hale for president and a relative newcomer, George W. Julian of Indiana, for vice president.51

Back in New York, however, National Reform support for the Free Democracy proved to be far from a foregone conclusion. Convinced that they held the balance of power over the decisive New York state vote in the upcoming election, the National Reformers held a public meeting in Broadway’s Military Hall to debate strategies and weigh the merits of each new party alignment.52 A year before, Tammany Hall had hosted a pro-land reform meeting which ended with the nomination of Wisconsin Democrat I. P. Walker as the “Land Reform” candidate for

President in 1852. But strikingly, land reformers’ disdain for the actual Democratic nominee that year, the New Hampshire proslavery “doughface,” , was unanimous at the August

18th meeting at Military Hall. Reporting back from Pittsburgh, William West declared the Free

51 Marshall, “Free Democratic Convention of 1852,” 159, 160–64; Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 242. See also the report in (London) People’s Paper 18, 4 September 1852. 52 The National Reformers estimated, with little consistency, that they directly controlled either 6,000 or 16,000 votes.

284 Democracy’s platform to be “perfect,” but its candidate, John P. Hale, was unsatisfactory

(although previously supported by Evans and others, Hale had never formally endorsed land reform, let alone agreed to be the Free Democrats’ candidate). Persuaded by the adoption of land reform by antislavery Whigs like Greeley, Salmon Chase, and William Seward, West explained that he had attended the Pittsburgh conference mainly in the hopes of getting the Whig candidate,

General Winfield Scott, nominated on the national ticket. Guided by the highly-visible hand of

Horace Greeley’s Tribune, a small number of important Whigs had begun to voice cautious acceptance of the .53 But another Pittsburgh delegate, William Young, protested, describing the Free Democrat’s platform as “one of the greatest that ever was,” and insisting that land reformers had a “duty” to vote for them. A Mr. Crawley agreed, believing that a vote for the new party would do more to damage the Democrats and expressing his fear that support for the Whigs would alienate strongly-Democratic Irish and German immigrants. Evans, meanwhile, counseled caution, insisting that “the wisest policy of all” would be to vote only for candidates pledged to land reform. But the overall thrust of the meeting was in favor of support for the Whigs—a startling turnaround for an organization with such solid roots in the party of

Jefferson and Jackson. Even to the staunchly Democratic Thomas Devyr, the northern

Democracy was now clearly operating “in collusion with the South.” Devyr favored throwing

National Reform votes to the Whigs in order to “fire a volley into the democrats, so that when the smoke clears away they will not know where to find themselves.”54

53 Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, 147–51; Roy Marvin Robbins, “Horace Greeley: Land Reform and Unemployment, 1837–1862,” Agricultural History Vol. 7, No. 1 (January, 1933): 18–41. 54 “Land Reform Meeting at Military Hall,” New York Herald, 19 August 1852. See also the New-York Tribune of the same date for an alternative account of the meeting. Of the meeting’s speakers, Magagnon, Ryckman, Sprague, Devyr, and West advocated voting for Scott, Young and Crawley for the Free Democrats. Evans voiced limited support for both Hale and Scott, but favored directing votes strategically. No speaker endorsed Pierce or the Democrats.

285 Even if it was largely strategic, the shift of land reform to support to the Whigs represented a significant reversal of the political order that had obtained at least since the advent of Jacksonian Democracy, one that betokened more significant realignments in the years to come. Unlike the alliance between land reformers and the Liberty Party in 1848-49, however, a formal political alliance between the National Reformers and the Free Democracy was not to be.

The Free Democratic Party itself would prove to be a short-lived phenomenon, with many of its leading lights going into the new Republican Party, while others returned to the Democratic fold.

Coinciding roughly with the eclipse of National Reform as a political movement, the demise of the Free Democracy after 1852 represented the last gasp of Free Soil as an organized third party.55 But it was far from the last time that “free soil,” in both its radical and more moderate guises, would make itself felt as a force to be reckoned with in American politics.

From Free Soil to Homestead: The Progress of Land Reform in National Legislation

Between 1848 and 1852, some eighteen states—more than half of those then in the

Union—passed homestead exemption laws, one of the National Reformers’ key demands. As

Paul Goodman has shown, the patchwork of exemption laws passed in the period “appeal[ed] to different interests for different reasons, though all professed a desire to prevent the free play of market forces from depriving families of their homes.”56 Ironically, given their national representatives’ later opposition to homestead measures, southern states had led the way in

55 Although some state organizations of the Free Soil/Free Democratic Party survived until 1854, as a national movement the Free Soil did not long outlast its relatively strong (but nonetheless ineffectual) electoral showing in 1848 (when the party gained thousands of votes in New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, but failed to carry a single state). On former Free Soilers in the Republican Party, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 149–85. 56 Paul Goodman, “The Emergence of Homestead Exemption in the United States: Accommodation and Resistance to the Market Revolution, 1840–1880,” Journal of American History 80, No. 2 (Sept 1993), 490; Lena London, “Homestead Exemption in the Wisconsin Constitution,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 32, No. 2 (Dec., 1948): 176–84. Speakers at the National Industrial Congress made much of this development in Albany in 1851; see National Era, 24 July 1851.

286 passing exemption laws, beginning with Texas in 1839; southern politicians saw exempting homesteads from seizure for debt as a way to cement unity between slaveholders and non- slaveholders by presenting a salve to white yeomen while insulating credit-dependent planters from the uncertainties of the free market.57 In the North, however, homestead exemption laws were largely the fruit of cooperation between Free Soilers and Whigs, with both groups prodded on by working-class land reformers. In Massachusetts, for example, the Free Soil Jacksonian

Frederick Robinson was able to push an exemption bill through the legislature with the help of a petition campaign organized by the NRA. In New York in 1847, a legislative “Select

Committee” on public lands was formed in part as a result of the National Reform petition campaign, consisting of two Democrats who had taken the National Reform pledge, two Anti- renters, and one Whig. The Select Committee adopted all three National Reform planks and used language that mirrored exactly the phrases used in NRA tracts and pamphlets; the following year, it quoted a speech made by Horace Greeley before a National Reform gathering. A Whig governor signed the state’s exemption law in 1850, a move somewhat hyperbolically hailed by

Greeley as making manifest the principle of “Free Homes for ever!”58

The success of homestead exemption laws between the late 1840s and early 1850s represented only the beginning of the process that led eventually to the passage of the Homestead

Act in 1862. The progress of homestead from the pet project of “agrarians” and “levellers” to

57 Goodman, “The Emergence of Homestead Exemption,” 477–81. Following the example of still-independent Texas, exemption laws passed first in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Some southerners even proposed extending the exemption principle to cover slave property as a means of undergirding paternalism while providing an inducement to the expansion of slave ownership. However, DeBow’s Review editor James De Bow and others rejected the idea as a violation of free market principles. Tellingly, South Carolina’s homestead exemption law, passed in 1851, was repealed in 1858. 58 “Mr. Alling’s Report on Land Reform,” National Reform Almanac for 1848 (New York: 1848), 27–33; Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 232–33; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 87–92; Tribune 13 April, 1850. The National Reformers returned the favor by including the Committee’s report in an extended pamphlet. The 1847 Select Committee was comprised of Alex M. Alling and John E. Develin of New York City (Democrats), J.C. Allaban of Delaware county and Robert D. Watson of Albany (Anti-rent) and Ansel Bascom of Seneca county (Whig).

287 one of the legislative pillars of a major political party represents one of the most remarkable turnarounds in American political history, not to mention one of the most striking examples of the “mainstreaming” of a formerly radical idea. When Rep. McConnell of New York presented a

National Reform memorial and announced his intention to introduce a bill to give a homestead to every head of a family in 1845, he was nearly laughed out of the House. The year before, Rep.

Thomasson of Kentucky had denounced National Reform measures as “ultra-agrarian.”59 But as it slowly made its way through Congress between 1850 and 1862, the homestead principle came to involve some of the most famous names in mid-nineteenth century American politics. At one time or another, homestead measures eventually came to enjoy support from a wide range of political figures that included the conservative socialist Horace Greeley and the radical free trader Gerrit Smith; representatives of southern yeomen like Sam Houston and Andrew Johnson; widely-respected northern statesmen like and Stephen Douglas; future

Republicans like Democrat Salmon P. Chase and Whig William H. Seward; and future Radicals like George W. Julian, Benjamin Wade, and Galusha Grow.60 But just as the radicalism that had originally undergirded concepts like “free labor” and “free soil” eventually became diluted as the meaning of these terms was articulated, contested, and subjected to trial by fire by unforeseen developments and political exigencies, the homestead policies that ultimately emerged were the products of a political process shaped by the ongoing struggles over slavery and prevailing views of political economy, the latter dominated by a free market ideology that could brook only so

59 Both quoted in Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 235. Thomasson’s quote can be found in the Congressional Globe, 28th Cong., 2nd Sess., HR, Appendix, p. 309. 60 The efforts of Johnson, Greeley, Smith, Julian, and Grow are discussed in detail below. Daniel Webster, an implacable opponent of free land grants in the 1830s, in January 1850 urged the Senate to discuss his measure to offer free land grants to settlers who resided on the public lands for three years. Douglas agreed that giving away free public lands to actual settlers after a period of residence was the best land policy. Samuel Houston proposed amending Seward’s plan to give away free land to Hungarian exiles, by providing 160-acre tracts to those who resided on them for three years, defending his proposal in terms of the safety-valve theory. Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 139–45.

288 much interference in the values of the market or in the institution of private property. Ultimately, the Homestead Act of 1862 would fail to satisfy the expectations of even many of its more moderate supporters.

Nonetheless, the eventual triumph of Homestead was a testament to the persistent appeal of ideas first enunciated in coherent form by the National Reformers, and if their more radical version of homestead was not to be the form in which it ultimately emerged, the NRA and those they had influenced nonetheless played an important role in shaping the debates over the measure. On March 9, 1846, Representative Richard Platt Herrick, a Whig from the Anti-rent county of Rensselaer, New York, introduced a homestead bill with the backing of the National

Reform Association. Although Horace Greeley felt that the bill was not sufficiently “speculative proof,” it was deemed radical enough that the House refused to even print the proposed measure.61 A few months after Herrick’s bid, however, Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson proposed an amendment to the 1846 Graduation bill in the House, in which public lands be given away free in quarter-sections to heads of families who could provide evidence of their poverty.

Supporters of the measure in Congress pointed to National Reform propaganda (specifically its

“Vote Yourself a Farm” slogan) as evidence that the passage of land reform was a necessary stop-gap to head off an otherwise inevitable uprising of landless workers.62

Johnson’s amendment, however, failed to provide for either limitation or alienability, and defined public land distribution in terms of charity, not as a natural right. Moreover, as the dominant proposals for public land distribution before 1846, both “graduation” (the scaling of

61 Tribune, 18 April 1846; Robbins, “Horace Greeley,” 27. 62 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 163; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 133–34. In defending the measure, Johnson denied that it was “agrarian” or “levelling.” Regardless, Johnson’s persistent support for homestead measures as a Congressman may have gone farther than historians have recognized in earning him the support of northern workingmen during his later presidency.

289 the price of government land according to quality) and “preëmption” (which allowed settlers on land not yet surveyed or sold to purchase the land at the minimum price) failed to provide adequate safeguards against speculation or satisfy believers in a “natural right to the soil.”

Similar schemes to provide land grant “bounties” to Mexican War veterans were opposed by land reformers for the same reason. Just as importantly, these early bills mandated both the retrocession of the public lands and the control over parceling out grants to the individual states, rather than to individual settlers or to “the people” at large—a distinction with important implications for parallel arguments, then still developing, over the fate of slavery in the territories and the constitutional and legal nature of slavery as either a “national” or “local” institution. After 1846, schemes for graduation became increasingly opposed to “Homestead” measures, and southerners in Congress increasingly pushed the former as their hostility towards the latter grew.63

In 1848, a vision of Homestead more amenable to National Reformers was proposed by

Horace Greeley. After a brief flirtation with the Free Soil Party that summer, Greeley’s Tribune had returned to the fold by endorsing Whig candidate Zachary Taylor. Greeley’s reward from

New York Whig kingpin Thurlow Weed was a nomination on the ticket for an unexpired term in

Congress that year. Shortly after his election that November, Greeley announced his intention to introduce a homestead bill. This he did on December 13th; but as the short session of Congress was about to adjourn, Greeley’s bill was not taken up until February of the following year.64 In response to a western congressman’s query about why a New Yorker would be interested in land

63 Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 119–26, 131–33. Early versions of homestead bills proposed by Samuel Houston and Stephen A. Douglas similarly defined free or low-cost sales of public lands in terms of charity. 64 Greeley’s bill offered landless men the right to preempt one hundred and sixty acres for seven years and on condition of improving and occupying it the right to hold forever forty acres of the same by a single man or eighty acres by the head of a family. Greeley’s son Nathan Greeley later, if somewhat inaccurately, referred to his father’s legislative effort as “one of the first, if not the first effort in Congress in the direction which in 1862 resulted in the passage of what is known as the Homestead Law.” A Bibliography of Horace Greeley, Compiled by Nathan Greeley, Editor of the Delta, New Orleans (New York, n.d.) 39n.

290 reform, Greeley replied that “he represented more landless men than any other member” of the

House. Nonetheless, the bill was tabled, with only twenty members announcing support, and

Greeley would not be elected to a second term. Doubtless, Greeley’s other legislative efforts during his short term in the House—which included a bill to abolish slavery in Washington,

D.C.—had done little to stir enthusiasm for his land reform legislation in Congress. Nonetheless, he submitted several National Reform and other homestead petitions to Congress during his tenure, and continued to serve as an effective mouthpiece for land reform, antislavery, and a host of “radical” pro-labor measures in the pages of the Tribune.65 Homestead would have to await the arrival of a political paradigm shift, as well as the emergence of a new cohort of political sponsors, to have a chance at being written into law.

Isaac Pigeon Walker and the Strange Career of Homestead Reform in Congress

The efforts of a freshman Democratic Senator from the new state of Wisconsin met with somewhat greater success. The Virginia-born I. P. (Isaac Pigeon) Walker had been a legal colleague of Abraham Lincoln (whom he defeated for a position as a presidential elector on the

Free Soil ticket) in Springfield, Illinois before moving to Wisconsin, where he became a strong supporter of the homestead exemption clause in the defeated 1846 state constitution. In 1848 he was appointed by the state legislature to become one of the state’s first Senators. By that time,

Walker had already made a name for himself as a “Locofoco” (as radical Democrats in the state were still sometimes called), railing against the abuses of English landlords in Ireland, denouncing banks and paper money, and advocating the rights of women and immigrants. He

65 “Memorial of citizens of New York asking that the Public Lands of the United States be made free to actual settlers,” January 19, 1849; referred to the Committee on Public Lands. National Archives, House Records HR30A–G19.2 (30th Cong., 1847–19). Greeley’s efforts earned him the respect of the Industrial Congress, which debated nominating him for its Vice Presidential candidate in 1851. See the New York Herald, 10 June 1851. See also Robbins, “Horace Greeley”; John R. Commons, “Horace Greeley and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Sept., 1909), 468–488.

291 championed a provision in the proposed state constitution which would have given married women the right to control property, and supported the then-radical measures of direct election of senators and direct taxation of personal property. As a Senator, he supported compensating the

Menominee and Creeks for lands unlawfully taken from them, and envisioned a homestead plan for Native Americans not unlike the one he put forth for white farmers. Walker had supported the Liberty Party in 1844, and on the eve of his election in 1848 had declared himself

“uncompromisingly opposed to the extension of chattel slavery into territory either now owned or which may hereafter be acquired by the United States.”66

Nonetheless, Walker has sometimes been construed as a northern dupe to the Slave

Power—an impression shared by his colleagues in the Wisconsin state legislature, who voted to censure him in 1849 and who replaced him in 1855 for what they perceived as his insufficient commitment to antislavery. But a review of Walker’s record in the Senate suggests that he made a more substantial contribution to the legal and constitutional effort to curb the Slave Power than either contemporaries or later historians have acknowledged.67

In any event, it was as a champion of homestead rather than antislavery that first brought

Walker to attention on the national stage. After a relatively uneventful first term in the Thirtieth

Congress, Walker made formal contact with the local National Reform branch in Mukwonago,

Wisconsin.68 His re-election secured, Walker presented a resolution on December 24th, 1849, providing for the cession of public lands to the states in which they were located, on the condition that the states then transfer these lands in limited quantities to actual settlers at the cost

66 Letter to C. L. Sholes, June 7, 1848, published in the Daily Wisconsin, 17 June 1848; Merle Curti, “Isaac P. Walker: Reformer in Mid-Century Politics,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 34:1 (Autumn, 1950): 3–5, 61. 67 Merle Curti, “Isaac P. Walker: Reformer in Mid-Century Politics,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 34:1 (Autumn, 1950): 3–6, 58–62; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 140–46. Wisconsin’s senators, like those of most states, were elected by its state legislators in this period. 68 Published in the Waukesha Democrat, 23 January 1849.

292 of survey and transfer.69 Although this proposal, like those of Johnson, Houston, and Douglas, violated the official National Reform position that “the people,” not the states, were the rightful owners of the land, Walker’s plan added the crucial—and, to most, radical—measure of land limitation. Citing statistics provided by the Cincinnati Industrial Congress, Walker insisted that only his plan could protect the interests of western farmers against land speculators and of the

“working class” against “capitalists.”70 The resolution went nowhere, but in September 1850

Walker introduced an amendment to a House bill that would have made 160-acre grants of land to settlers in the Oregon country permanent and inalienable, in accordance with National Reform principles. After the Committee on Public Lands reported adversely on the amendment as impracticable, Walker attacked its report in a two-day long speech that he framed as an effort “to advocate the rights of labor” against an attempt by eastern capitalists and politicians to prevent industrial workers from moving out of the crowded East in order to “FORCE THE WAGES OF

LABOR TO THE EUROPEAN STANDARD.” Although backed by William H. Seward and

Henry Dodge in the Senate and George W. Julian in the House, as well as petitions from supporters of National Reform, the amendment failed.71

In the meantime, Walker had been attempting to stake out a careful stance on the various measures comprising the “Omnibus bill” that eventually became known as the Compromise of

1850. But Walker’s efforts to carve out a nuanced position on the Compromise proved to be a misstep, one for which he would eventually pay a heavy price. The Wisconsin state legislature had instructed its senators to oppose the admission of California, New Mexico, or “any other

69 The resolution was eventually presented to the Senate as S.85, “A Bill to cede the public lands of the United States...” 31st Cong., 1st Sess. January 28, 1850. 70 Albany Freeholder, 28 August 1850, cited in Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 236. 71 Curti, “Isaac P. Walker,” 6; Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 140–44. See S. 85, “A Bill to cede the public lands of the United States...”, 31st Cong, 1st Sess. Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 140–46; Walker’s speech from Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 2nd Sess., Senate, Jane 13, 1851, quoted in Zahler 143–44. Curti notes that “as the homestead issue became mixed up with the cause of freedom in the territories, prospects for its approval in the Senate faded.”

293 Territory” into the Union without an explicit provision forever prohibiting the introduction of slavery into these areas. But on February 20th, 1849, Walker submitted an amendment to a general appropriation bill that extended Constitutional authority to California and New Mexico without such a guarantee. Walker defended the procedure in terms of his understanding of the

Constitution and his fear of “disastrous” consequences for the Union if some kind of compromise with southerners was not found. This, however, was not enough to appease the swelling tide of antislavery sentiment at home or amongst abolitionist opinion-makers in New York; both

Sherman Booth’s Free Democrat and Greeley’s New-York Tribune decried Walker’s move, and the Wisconsin legislature voted to censure him.72

Regardless of the actual depth or sincerity of Walker’s commitment to antislavery, he played a significant role in the protracted debate over the Compromise, helping to outline legal and constitutional arguments that would later prove useful to Republican antislavery politicians and theorists, particularly Walker’s Senate colleagues Seward and Chase. In a published appeal to Wisconsin voters that fall, Walker proclaimed himself undeserving of the legislature’s censure and denied that he had ever proposed or voted for any measure that did not, in its spirit and effect, provide an effective barrier to slavery in the territories. A few months later, during the ongoing Senate debate, he introduced an amendment making the remarkable statement that

“slavery does not exist by law, but has been abolished and prohibited, together with the slave trade and cannot... be introduced into any of the territory acquired by the United States from the

Republic of Mexico without positive enactments.”73 A dismayed southern senator complained that such an amendment would “take away the whole ground at once that our people rest upon.”

72 Curti, “Isaac P. Walker,” 58–59. 73 Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 October 1849; Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Vol. 19, Part I, pp. 439–40, cited in Curti, “Isaac P. Walker,” 60.

294 “Precisely so,” Walker replied. He went on to lay out what he believed to be the implications of his argument, launching into an extended discourse that cited Mexican laws governing slavery as binding precedents in the territories newly acquired by the United States. Mexico’s gradual emancipation act of 1823; further acts passed in 1824 and 1837; President Vicente Guerrero’s antislavery and equal-citizenship decree of 1829; and Mexico’s Constitution of 1843–44—all,

Walker argued, had not only abolished slavery completely within Mexico’s territorial bounds, but had established the “free air” principle by which any claim to enslaved property brought into formerly Mexican territory was automatically null and void.74

Walker thus drew on longstanding abolitionist theories as well as historic and legal precedent in an effort to prevent slavery from expanding into the western territories acquired from Mexico—a development that he and other land reformers realized would prove fatal to their cherished hopes for their favored reform. As further proof of the illegality of slavery on Mexican soil, Walker elucidated the principle then just beginning to become popularized under the rubric of “Freedom National.” Responding to arguments by Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi on the right to carry slave property into the territories, Walker insisted that no such right existed outside of the states where slavery was made law: “I answer, that slavery is a purely local institution; that it has no foundation in nature, or support in the laws of God; that it exists, and can only exist, by virtue of the local laws of the States.” Finally, he turned to land reform arguments against the extension of slavery. Citing a set of statistics about the amount of land still unclaimed and unsettled in the existing slave states, he claimed that the amount of unoccupied land in the existing slave states, could provide “equal to 160 acres... to be worked by every slave, man, woman, and child, in the Republic.” Simultaneously, then, Walker’s vision of land reform

74 Isaac P. Walker, The Compromise Resolutions. Speech of Hon. I. P. Walker, of Wisconsin, in Senate of the United States, March 6, 1850, On the Compromise Resolutions submitted by Mr. Clay, on the 25th of January, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1850), 3–11, 13.

295 undermined slaveholders’ arguments about the necessity of slavery’s expansion and drove home well-established free soil arguments about the tendency of slave plantations to usurp large amounts of land that could more beneficially be turned into productive small holdings farmed by freemen.75

The Compromise of 1850 would nonetheless go on to passage, while Homestead became stalled (Walker’s Homestead bill was eventually defeated, in January 1852). In the meantime, however, Walker’s efforts had endeared him to land reformers in New York and New Jersey, winning him the endorsement of the National Industrial Congress, which met in Trenton that summer. Mass meetings in New York City in August 1850, comprised of “the workingmen of the city,” featured a roster of speakers that included Walker, Evans, Horace Greeley, Thomas

Devyr, Mike Walsh, John Commerford, and the German revolutionary William Weitling. The following year, perhaps in a belated bid to jump on the land reform bandwagon, Tammany Hall extended an invitation to the New York City Industrial Congress to “all those in favor of Land and other Industrial reform”; after a “spirited debate” within the NYCIC, the invitation was accepted. The subsequent meeting at Tammany was a mixed affair; after being called to order by

John Keyser, the meeting passed resolutions recognizing Andrew Johnson, Stephen Douglas, and

George Julian for their support of land reform measures and nominated Walker for the presidency. Little ultimately came, however, of the attempt by the City Democracy to attach itself to the cause of land reform. As the National Era predicted, if Tammanyites stuck to the pledge adopted at the meeting not to vote for any candidate not pledged to securing the freedom of the soil, they would almost certainly be compelled to vote against the Democratic nominee in

1852, since the “Slaveholding Interest” would “encourage no system of measures tending to

75 Walker, Compromise Resolutions, 3–11, 13.

296 multiply free States, to enhance the rewards of free labor, or to convert the poorer classes of white people in the slave States into small cultivators.” And indeed, Tammany stuck fast by the nomination of Franklin Pierce that fall, bearing out the Tribune’s assertion that the meeting had been an effort by “those professional politicians—Hunkers by instinct—who trim their sails for every breeze suspected of blowing in a popular direction.”76

Nevertheless, a handful of politicians from both sides of the aisle, perhaps swayed by the homestead petitions pouring in from their districts, continued to move towards an embrace of

Homestead. Over the next year and a half, the Industrial Congress stepped up its campaign to distribute circulars to land reformers around the country and sent its own petitions to Congress, praying that the measure “known as the homestead bill” then pending in the Senate would become law. Congressman James of New York presented the NIC petition to the House, while

William H. Seward presented another NIC memorial against the contested policy of awarding land grants as “bounties” to former soldiers.77 Salmon Chase presented nine pro-Homestead petitions from the citizens of Ohio, and Walker fifteen from Wisconsin, along with others from

Indiana and New Jersey. Massachusetts sent some twenty-two petitions in favor of the bill, while

76 For accounts of the meeting, including those quoted here, see “Land Reform and the New York ‘Democracy,’” and “Tammany on Land Reform,” New-York Daily Tribune 4 June 1851; National Era, June 12, 1851. For an account of the invitation from Tammany and its reception, see “Labor Movements,” Tribune 30 May 1851. Jamie Bronstein erroneously states that the meeting was held by “the National Reformers and the Free Democracy”; Working-Class Land Reform, 241. Regardless, most historians that have noted the relationship between Tammany and land reform have followed the lead of John Commons et al., who wrongly assumed that the meeting signaled a fatal co-optation of the movement by corrupt Democratic politicians. See Commons, ed., History of Labour, Vol. I, 560–61. The Tribune sardonically noted the reluctance of Florida Democrat James D. Wescott, who addressed the gathering via letter, to join the “Land Reform Party” because“certain anti-slavery men had also declared themselves in opposition to a monopoly of the public lands.” New-York Daily Tribune 4 June 1851. Nonetheless, the event probably helped solidify Walker’s status as the standard-bearer of National Reform in Congress. 77 National Era, 10 June 1852; New York Herald, 7 June 1852; Journal of the Senate, Vol. 43 (June 8th, 1852), 458; Congressional Globe, 32nd Cong, 1st Sess., 1532; June 1852; Journal of the Senate, Vol. 43 (December 9th, 1854), 42.

297 others arrived from surviving Fourierist communities in Monmouth, New Jersey, and Ceresco,

Wisconsin.78

Meanwhile, land reform principles had made steady gains among the respectable news outlets and thought leaders in the country. Not only Greeley’s Tribune, but even conservative papers like the Courier and Enquirer now began to embrace moderate land reform as a sensible and just alternative to militant trade unionism or European-style social unrest. The Jacksonian

Democratic Review, while insisting on adherence to free trade orthodoxy, admitted that “the right of man to the soil, and the principles for which land reformers contend must be considered mainly sound.” (James Gordon Bennett’s Herald, however, remained steadfast in its opposition to land reform “buncombe,” although even it preferred Walker’s bill to the National Reformers’

“socialism”).79

Walker’s bill was defeated in early 1852. A second Homestead bill made it past the

House that May, only to be shot down by a coalition of southern slaveholders and northern manufacturers in the Senate. In dissenting from the measure, J. S. Millson of Virginia pronounced the notion of a right to the soil “a startling doctrine”; his fellow Virginian Thomas

H. Averett thought Homestead was an unconstitutional “effort to array the poor laborer against the capitalist and the property holder.” John Allison, from the iron-manufacturing 20th District of

78 Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 175. The North American Phalanx was located in Monmouth County, New Jersey; Ceresco was the home of the Wisconsin Phalanx. One of the New Jersey petitions contained sketches of a planned National Reform village, while Ceresco settlers took the further step of attempting to organize such a village in one acre lots with communally-run mills, bakeries, and a washhouse. 79 New-York Tribune, 2 March 1850; Evening Post, 2 March, New York Herald, 30 August 1850; Courier and Enquirer, 29, 30 August 1850; all quoted in Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 141–42; “Land and Labor Reform,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, Vol. 27, No. 148 (Oct 1850), 291–304. For Bennett’s response, see “Delusions of the Day,” 6 May 1852, on the National Industrial Congress, as well as the Herald’s coverage of National Reform and the NIC generally. See also Greeley’s Speech at Land Reform meeting held at Tammany Hall, New York, Aug 29, 1850; Tribune, “The Missouri Compromise Meeting” 5 Jan 1851, p. 5; “The People’s Meeting” 18 Feb 1851. The Herald’s biased coverage of the land reform movement has colored scholars’ interpretations of the movement to this day; see the depiction in Anthony Gronowicz, Race Class and Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). On Greeley, see “Slavery in the Territories,” (signed editorial in the Tribune, 24 March 1849); Greeley, “Speech at Land Reform meeting held at Tammany Hall, New York, Aug 29, 1850.”

298 Pennsylvania, accused the proponents of Homestead of “render[ing] useless and valueless millions of capital” and “depreciat[ing the] value of real estate,” while John Sutherland, a conservative Whig from New York, blamed the measure on “certain associations, called

‘Industrial Congresses’,” which he characterized as “offsprings of the German school of socialism, and of the American school of ‘higher law’ transcendentalism,” a reference to

Seward’s antislavery “Higher Law” speech of 1850.80

In the meantime, however, a new generation of statesmen had emerged, many from the plains and prairies of the West, who combined elements of the radical tradition of Jeffersonian democracy and republican understandings of the right to the fruit of one’s labor with a more militant antislavery and an insistence on mankind’s “right to the soil.” One of these was a young

Congressman who had been elected from David Wilmot’s district in Pennsylvania. In his second speech in the House of Representatives (the first had been a ringing endorsement of Kossuth),

Galusha Grow “denied the position that the Government had any right to make the public lands a source of revenue, and argued to prove that every citizen had as natural a right to the soil, as he had to air and sunlight.” Arguing against Andrew Johnson’s paternalistic version of Homestead,

Grow insisted, in language that closely mirrored the rhetoric of the National Reformers, that

“each person had a right to so much of the earth’s surface as was necessary to his support,” and demanded that land should be granted “in limited quantities to actual settlers, and that man should have restored to him his natural right to the soil.”81

Another effective advocate of Homestead measures was a former schoolteacher and antislavery congressman from Indiana, . In a speech on the Homestead

80 Congressional Globe Vol. XXV, 32d Cong, 1st Sess., 8 April 1852, pp 1018-1020; Ibid., Appendix, 28 April 1852, p. 256; 20 Apr 1852, p. 432. 81 Congressional Globe, 30 March 1852, p. 926. John R. Commons apparently believed that Grow’s speech was ““merely and oratorical transcript from the Working Man’s Advocate.” See Commons, “Horace Greeley,” 484. On Grow, see also Robert D. Ilisevich, Galusha Grow: The People’s Candidate (Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).

299 measure in the House of Representatives at the beginning of the previous year, Julian explicitly outlined the connection between “the freedom of the public lands” and the antislavery cause.

Since slavery could only thrive “on extensive estates,” distributing the public lands “in limited plantations, to actual settlers” would provide a “far more formidable barrier against the introduction of slavery” than Daniel Webster’s notion of a natural limit to slavery in the arid

West, or even a political barrier like that provided by Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance. Land redistribution would fatally weaken slavery not only by preventing its physical spread, but by demonstrating the superiority of free labor to slave labor and upholding the honor of the former, reflecting the government’s commitment to upholding the laborer’s right to “the fruits of his own labor,” and undermining chattel slavery by making “war upon its kindred system of wage slavery.” Land reform, Julian concluded, was “therefore an anti-slavery measure.”82

If Julian appeared to at last square the circle by combining an attack on “wage slavery” with an operational antislavery program, he also took pains to clarify that he was “no believer in the doctrines of agrarianism, or socialism, as these terms are generally understood.” Land reformers, Julian insisted, “claim no right to interfere with the laws of property of the several

States... They simply demand, that... Congress shall give its sanction to the natural right of the landless citizen of the country to a home upon its soil.”83 But whether in its “agrarian” or more moderate guise, Homestead continued to converge with the imperatives of antislavery restriction over the remainder of the 1850s. Even those land reformers, who, like Thomas Devyr, remained relatively unsympathetic to antislavery were aware of the ways in which the two reforms had

82 “The Public Lands. Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, of Indiana, Delivered in the House of Representatives, Jan. 29, 1851,” in the National Era, 13 February 1851. Julian portrayed land reform not as an outgrowth of “agrarianism, or socialism,” or other “leveling” doctrines but as a necessary corrective to an illicit usurpation of land under the guise of a specious right to a commodity to which all were entitled equally. In a single speech, Julian in effect synthesized a half-century of arguments made by land reformers and free labor advocates. For Julian on slavery, see Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, on the Slavery Question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850, (Washington: Congressional Globe, 1850). 83 Quoted in Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 236.

300 become mutually dependent. As Devyr put it in a letter to Horace Greeley, the question was now whether “the freedom of the Public Lands to actual settlers—forever limiting the farm to 160 acres—would this simple measure, or would it not, keep slavery out of the Territories?”84 Far from diluting the dynamic force of either abolitionism or agrarianism, the intersection of antislavery and homestead would prove to be, for a time at least, mutually reinforcing. Over the next several years, the journey from Free Soil to Homestead, and the political realignment this development prefigured, would come full circle with the rise of the Republican Party in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The eventual victory of the Republicans would usher in a new era for both antislavery and Homestead.

84 Thomas Ainge Devyr, The Odd Book of the Nineteenth Century, or ‘Chivalry’ in Modern Days, A Personal Record of Reform—Chiefly, Land Reform, for the Last Fifty Years (Thomas A. Devyr, 1882), American Section, 105–06.

301

CHAPTER nine Kansas-Nebraska, the Fight for Homestead, and the Rise of Republican Free Labor

Throughout 1855 and 1856, Parke Godwin penned an influential collection of essays for

Putnam’s Magazine. Later published under the title Political Essays, Godwin tackled such topics as the fallout over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the demise of the Second Party System, the rise of

Nativism, and the threat to free society posed by what he labeled the rise of southern

“despotism.” Like a growing number of former radicals and reformers in the North, Godwin now saw slavery as “the fundamental and vital question,” “the rock on which, if any, we shall split.”

In an essay titled “Kansas Must Be Free,” Godwin blamed the “gigantic fraud... committed in the name of slavery” for “the late outbreak of anti-slavery feeling, and particularly for its appearance among those classes which have not heretofore manifested a strong tendency in that direction.”

Combining the emerging Republican doctrine of “freedom national” with an emphasis on the superiority of free labor, Godwin lamented the substitution of ideals of democratic equality for

“a dogma about the natural superiority of certain races” and the tendency of the slaveholding class “to defend the subjugation of labor as a just and normal condition.” The spread of slavery to formerly free soil had precipitated an urgent crisis; for “if the American people do not now, on the instant, rescue those lands to freedom, it is in vain that they will hereafter look to nature or any other influences for their salvation.” Although he openly called only for a restoration of the

Missouri Compromise—along with the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and legislation guaranteeing “THE HOMESTEAD FOR FREE MEN ON THE PUBLIC LANDS”—Godwin’s essays made it clear that he, like William H. Seward, now viewed the conflict between slavery

303 and freedom as irrepressible, and like Abraham Lincoln, that slavery should be placed “on the path to extinction.”1

The similarities between the analysis of this former radical and soon-to-be-former

Democrat and those of prominent Republicans were not coincidental. In June, 1856, the same year that the Essays were published, Godwin served as a clerk for the committee on platform at the Republican Party’s first national convention in Philadelphia. Although the exact nature of his contribution to the 1856 party platform remains unclear, at least one later chronicler noted that it bore a significant resemblance to the principles laid out in Godwin’s Essays. George Haven

Putnam, the publisher of Putnam’s Magazine, would assign to Godwin much of the credit for this first formulation of Republican Party principles.2

Throughout the Political Essays Godwin framed the essential contest as one between “the two social systems of the North and South.” The controversy, Godwin explained, demonstrated once again that “the fundamental and vital question” was between free labor and slavery; most vitally, the issue of “whether the one or the other of these influences shall prevail in the organization of new territories.” According to Godwin, the latter was not a question “of races, nor of abstract theories of rights, nor even of religious convictions...but of actual facts.” As far as

Godwin was concerned, “the results of [the] two social experiments” were already in, and had been demonstrated amply in favor of the former. Citing sources like Henry C. Carey’s Principles of Political Economy, Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Seaboard Slave States, 1850 Census

1 Parke Godwin, Political Essays (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1856), 48, 55, 254–55, 283, 320–21. Godwin dedicate the Essays to Charles Sumner, the recent victim of Preston Brook’s assault on the floor of Congress for the crime of exposing “The Crime Against Kansas.” For an overview of Godwin’s career, see John R. Wennersten, “Parke Godwin, Utopian Socialism, and the Politics of Antislavery,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly (July–October 1976). 2 George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher, 1865–1915 (New York: Putnam, 1915), 12–13. Putnam recalled that the essays he published in January 1856 set forth the principles upon which the new party should be founded, and claimed that as a result of Godwin’s “more or less accidental” appointment as clerk to the 1856 convention, “certain of the important plants in the platform came to be identified in character and almost identical in expression” with Godwin’s essays. According to Putnam, “Godwin might justly claim a large share in the credit for the first formulation of these principles.”

304 statistics on manufacturing and education, and James Henry Hammond’s own words about the dependent condition of poor whites in South Carolina, Godwin attempted to prove that, in a slave society, “the masses, with here and there an individual exception, cannot rise above the lowest level.” The choice was ultimately a simple one: whether the territories, and the future of the nation, would take their shape from “the pens and plantations of slavery, or from the factories and free-schools of freedom.”3

Godwin leveraged his experience in radical circles to mount a cogent response to southern depictions of the North as a hotbed of Fourierism, socialism, and other radical movements. In a free society, Godwin explained, such “isms and vagaries” were “scarcely felt as evils”; these “ferments” were merely the harmless “outlets of irritation that might otherwise be deep and dangerous.” In a cunning reversal, Godwin now placed the onus of “radicalism” on the

South. It was in southern society that threats of personal and mob violence were manifested and lawless schemes of filibustering were being carried out; in the South, “the threat of taking up arms against the Union is a favorite method of discussion.” Likewise, in response to southern charges about the crass money-worship of northern capitalism, Godwin blamed the decadence of the slaveholding empire for the creation of a national descent into “gross materialism,” which had gradually been substituted for “the grand and beautiful theory” at the center of the American way of life: the “just and magnanimous recognition of the worth of every human being,” and an

“utter disdain” for “the spirit of caste.”4

If Godwin had largely eschewed the Fourierism and Loco-focoism of his youth in favor of a more cautious brand of “free labor” by the mid-1850s, he never abandoned the hope expressed by those movements for a more economically just and egalitarian society. One of the

3 Godwin, Political Essays, 283–97. 4 Ibid., 269–70, 300–02.

305 original signers of the call to create the Industrial Congress, Godwin had been a frequent attendee at land reform and Fourierite events, including an 1847 National Reform Ball also attended by William Lloyd Garrison.5 In 1854 Godwin was elected Vice President of the

Typographical Society, the union that represented typesetters and other print workers. If

Godwin’s background made him somewhat unusual in the new Republican Party, he was far from alone. Although former Democrats like Salmon Chase, William H. Seward, and Francis P.

Blair were a minority in the new party, they played an outsized role in shaping its direction.

If few former Whigs shared Greeley’s history of advocating causes that most Whigs found highly suspect, neither could many boast the influence wielded by Greeley’s Tribune. By

1860, the Tribune had grown to become the most widely-read paper in the country, with a circulation of between 217,000 and 247,000, making it a highly effective vehicle for spreading

Republicanism, often tinged with support for land reform, abolitionism, and other ideas considered too radical for publications that lacked the Tribune’s reputation.6

Whether Democrat or Whig, figures who were considered “radicals” either for their abolitionism, advocacy of labor reform, or both—a cohort which included Horace Greeley of the

Tribune, Gamaliel Bailey of the National Era, Henry Wilson, Benjamin Wade, and Charles

Sumner—were among the first to call for the formation of a new party in the wake of the

Kansas-Nebraska Act.7 Others with yet more radical pedigrees played instrumental roles in the

5 Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 146. 6 Selig Perlman, A History of Trade Unionism in the United States, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922), 38; Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2009), 145–46, 269 n63. The 1860 circulation had quadrupled from that of ten years previous. Tuchinsky’s statistic is derived from a combined circulation of the Tribune’s daily, weekly, semiweekly, and California editions, as calculated by the New-York Weekly Tribune, 31 August, 1850; 18 November 1854; 7 January 1860. By that time, as Tuchinsky points out, the Tribune’s circulation was all the more impressive given its almost entirely sectional nature; the paper found only handfuls of subscribers in the South or even in border states like Maryland and Delaware. 7 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 126–27; 149–185; William H. Seward’s efforts in favor of homestead and other land

306 new party. Charles A. Dana, the Tribune’s assistant editor and a devotee of Fourier and

Proudhon, rose to become Assistant Secretary of War in the Lincoln administration. Although

Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, never relinquished his Democratic Party affiliation, he prodded Lincoln to pursue a policy of emancipation, and later played a role in the Freedmen’s

Bureau and in drafting the Fourteenth Amendment. Gerrit Smith ran for President on both the

Land Reform and Radical Abolition tickets in 1856, but—after suffering a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, in which Smith was implicated as a member of the “” group of Brown’s backers—he re-emerged to become a staunch supporter of the Republicans during the war. German immigrant radicals with roots in the 1848 revolutions who became Republicans included not only the well-known Union commanders Carl

Schurz and Franz Siegel but the Cincinnati abolitionist , publisher of the anti- capitalist Cincinnati Republikaner, and Joseph Weydemeyer, publisher of Die Revolution and founder of the American Worker’s League, or Arbeiterbund (both also served in the during the war).8 And in Wisconsin, land reformers played a key role in the Republican Party’s very formation. Sometime in the early 1850s, National Reform Association National Secretary

Alvan E. Bovay had traveled West to join the Wisconsin Phalanx at Ceresco, headed by Warren

B. Chase. After the Phalanx disbanded, the town was renamed Ripon, and in February 1854,

Bovay found himself chairing anti-Kansas-Nebraska meetings in the local schoolhouse and

Congregational Church. Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, abolitionist and land reformer Sherman

reform legislation have also been outlined above, while another future Republican, Salmon Chase, made the connection between the 1850 Compromise and the future of land reform efforts in a speech made to constituents in Toledo, Ohio, in 1851 (during the debate on the Land Bounty Act, Chase had proposed an amendment offering 160 acres to “every landless citizen” as well as any immigrant who intended to become a citizen, but explained the measure “the friends of Land Reform” did not consider the measure expedient at the time). See Speech of Senator Chase, Delivered at Toledo, May 31st, 1851, Before a Mass Convention of the Democracy of North-Western Ohio (1851), 7. 8 Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 369–70.

307 Booth that passed a series of resolutions that were then adopted by other anti-Nebraska meetings throughout the state, including one vowing to forgo former party affiliations and organize a new party dedicated to the non-extension of slavery should the Kansas-Nebraska bill pass. Bovay’s

Ripon group approved this resolution at the village schoolhouse on March 20th—an event which to which many historians trace the founding of the Republican Party. When questioned why he had advocated calling the new party “Republican,” Bovay explained in terms that hearkened to the egalitarian promise of the early nation: the name captured “the thing we wish to symbolize—

Respublica—the common weal.”9

In the meantime, urban workers, buffeted by an economic recession between 1855 and

1856 and then again by the Panic of 1857, continued to seek both redress for their grievances via strikes, trades unions, and political activism, and escape from the over-competition of crowded eastern cities via cooperative and communitarian ventures. A “Western Farm and Village

Association” organized by John Commerford and several others in New York sent National

Reformer Ransom Smith on a scouting mission to seek out potential sites for a National Reform community during the winter of 1851–52; that May, several hundred workingmen made their way to Minnesota City (now Rollingstone, Minnesota). Ohio’s Thomas Sutherland formed a

“Nebraska Emigration Association” with the goal of consolidating local land reform organizations and establishing a free labor community in the territory that was soon to become the subject of so much controversy. An in 1856, J.K. Ingalls’ new employer, the New York manufacturer and inventor Thaddeus Hyatt, traveled to Kansas with a party of ninety ex-free

9 Frank A. Flower, History of the Republican Party, Embracing Its Origin, Growth, and Mission, together with Appendices of Statistics and Information Required by Enlightened Politicians and Patriotic Citizens (Springfield, Ill.: Union Publishing Company, 1884), 147–156; Diane S. Butler, “The Public Life and Private Affairs of Sherman M. Booth,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, (Spring 1999); Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 113–14. See also Andrew Wallace Crandall, The Early History of the Republican Party, 1854–56 (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1930), 20-21; Francis Curtis, The Republican Party: A History of its Fifty Years’ Existence and a Record of its Measures and Leaders, 1854–1904 Vol. I (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons), 174, 76, 78.

308 soilers in order to “furnish them with useful employment” by organizing the free-labor community of Hyattville in Anderson County. It was in “” that Hyatt encountered John Brown; he would later be jailed for refusing to offer testimony about his possible involvement in planning Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry. Although the precise nature of

Hyatt’s involvement with Brown remains a mystery, as Ingalls put it, “many a squattor [sic] in

Kansas, and many a working man in New York” had cause to remember him.10 Brown himself, of course, had lived for a time among the African-American community of Timbucto (North

Elba) on Gerrit Smith’s land in the Adirondacks, and his “Provisional Constitution” for the interracial society he envisioned included a provision for the common ownership of all property that was “the product of the labor of those belonging to this organization and their families.”11

One figure who would not live to see the unraveling of the Union that Brown’s raid helped precipitate, nor the partial triumph of his ideals under the new Republican administration, was George Henry Evans. Evans had left New York City for his farm in Granville, New Jersey at the beginning of the decade, where, saddled by debts, he eked out a precarious existence and traveled occasionally back to New York for National Reform activities. In 1855–56 he had been involved with a fellow former labor agitator, William Heighton, in pressuring New Jersey

Republicans to adopt land reform measures. Caught in a snowstorm on his way back from a speaking engagement, Evans took ill and succumbed to a “nervous fever” on February 2, 1856.

Leadership of the NRA, now officially known as the National Land Reform Association, would

10 Joshua King Ingalls, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform (Elmira, New York: Gazette Company, 1897), 45–48; John W. Geary to William L. Marcy, in Kansas Historical Society, “Thaddeus Hyatt Papers, 1843–1898: Biography, in ”"Selections from the Hyatt Manuscripts." 2 (1880): 203-221. Hyatt was the inventor of “illuminated sidewalks” that utilized iron covers embedded with glass to allow light to circulate to the cellars and vaults that lay below city streets. Having attained early success as a manufacturer, Hyatt curried favor among workers with his paternalistic employment schemes, but after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 his attention turned increasingly towards the struggle over slavery in “Bleeding Kansas.” Together with Gerrit Smith, Horace Greeley, and others, Hyatt organized the National Kansas Committee and Kansas Relief Committee, raising money and sending arms and provisions to aid the free-state cause there. 11 See “Article XXVIII,” in John Brown, Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States (1858).

309 pass onto Ingalls and Commerford, and the organization would steadily lose influence over the remainder of the decade.12

By that time, however, the momentous issues of land and slavery had re-entered the national conversation in an unexpected and irreversible way. The passage of the Kansas-

Nebraska Act on May 30th, 1854 would cause an unprecedented reaction among large segments of the northern population—one in which urban workingmen and their land reform allies would play a significant but still largely unrecognized role—and lead directly to the formation of a political party that embodied, if imperfectly, many of the ideals for which labor reformers and abolitionists had so long struggled.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act: Northern Workers Respond

As historians have long understood, the passage of Kansas-Nebraska unleashed a new antislavery militancy in the North. The brainchild of Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas, who cherished ambitions to drive a Pacific railroad from his home state of Illinois through the same plains and valleys that land reformers cherished for homesteads, the act threatened to open to slavery millions of acres of land not only in Kansas and Nebraska, but potentially in all remaining territories on either side of the dividing line of 36°30’ established by the Missouri

Compromise. Congressman Salmon P. Chase, assisted by Charles Sumner, Joshua Giddings,

Edward Wade, Alexander De Witt, and Gerrit Smith, fired off the “Appeal of the Independent

Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States,” reviving the old Wilmot Proviso and

Free Soil arguments and injecting them with fresh outrage at the audacity of the “Slave Power,”

12 Lause, Young America, 118–19, 219n17.

310 and Smith made a passionate speech in which he elaborated his theory of slavery as an “outlaw” institution.13

Although he did not sign the “Appeal,” Wisconsin’s Isaac Walker was one of only thirteen Senators to vote against Kansas-Nebraska’s passage.14 Despite this fact—or perhaps because of confusion surrounding whether Walker had in fact voted yes or no—the Wisconsin legislature subsequently rejected him in favor of long-time Congressman Charles Durkee, believed to be more staunchly antislavery. Although known as an abolitionist, Durkee’s land reform credentials were scarcely less impeccable; while a sitting U.S. Congressman from

Wisconsin’s 1st District, Durkee had presided over the 1852 National Industrial Congress (NIC) in Washington, D. C. It was one of many signs that northern public opinion had begun to decidedly shift in favor of antislavery, and it heralded the even more dramatic political shake-up to come.15

Reaction to Kansas-Nebraska percolated slowly among the general population in the

North at first, but when it emerged, labor organizations and labor-oriented newspapers like the

Tribune and the National Era were at the forefront of the opposition.16 Indeed, signs of northern

13 Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, J.R. Giddings, Edward Wade, Gerrit Smith, Alexander De Witt, Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the United States: Shall Slavery Be Permitted in Nebraska? (Towers’ Printers, 1854); No Slavery in Nebraska, No Slavery in the Nation, Slavery an Outlaw: Speech of Gerrit Smith, on the Nebraska Bill, in Congress, April 6, 1854, (Washington, D.C.: Buell & Blanchard, 1854); James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 194–97. 14 Congressional Globe, 33rd Congress, 1st Session, 1321 (25 May 1854). The final debate on the Nebraska Bill can be found in the “Appendix,” pp. 755–796. Among the congressmen voted out of office was Mike Walsh, who had been elected from New York’s Fourth Congressional District, which included the Bowery and working-class Fourth, Sixth, Tenth, and Fourteenth wards. Walsh’s vote in favor of Kansas-Nebraska and subsequent fall from grace had followed his falling out with the National Reformers, who he dismissively referred to as “bran-bread philosophers.” See the Congressional Globe, "Speech of the Hon. Mike Walsh, of New York, in the House of Representatives, May 19th, 1854," 33rd Congress, 1st Session, Vol. XXVIII (Washington, D.C. : Government Printing Office, 1855) Appendix, 1224; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 357; Robert Ernst, The One and Only Mike Walsh New-York Historical Society Quarterly Vol. 26 (1952): 43–65. In a letter to Charles Dana a decade earlier, Parke Godwin had described Walsh as “thoroughly unprincipled,—morally and intellectually,” a description that now seemed to be borne out. See Godwin to Charles Dana, 8 November 1844, Bryant-Godwin Papers, NYPL. 15 Charles Durkee was the Liberty Party nominee for Vice President in 1851-52, but declined the nomination. See Frederick Douglass’s Paper, November 13, 1851. 16 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 126–27.

311 laborers’ discontent over Kansas-Nebraska, and further portents of the political realignment this heralded, were evident even before the bill became law. On Feburary 17th, the Tribune issued a call, signed by a host of workingmen, their trades affixed next to their names, for a “People’s

Meeting” in opposition to the proposed legislation at the Broadway Tabernacle on the following day. The Tribune specifically called on “the mechanics, artisans and laboring masses of this metropolis” to voice their dissatisfaction. The next day, an “immense assembly” of what the

National Anti-Slavery Standard described as “the intelligent Workingmen of New York” met in the Tabernacle to protest the pending effort “now making by corrupt politicians to throw down the barriers created to prevent the extension of Slavery.” The workingmen loudly applauded a speech by former Liberty Party candidate John P. Hale, who phrased the great question of the day in terms of the threat it posed to the dwindling supply of free soil in the west, a much-needed reservoir for populations displaced by “the wars and oppressions of the Old World.” If northern workingmen and recent immigrants would only look to their interest in “free farms (enthusiastic cheers),” and “free houses (loud cheers),” Hale explained, they would recognize that the expansion of slavery threatened their ability to claim this rightful “inheritance.” In one of a number of orations of the period that anticipated William Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” speech four years later, the Rev. likewise characterized the conflict as one between “Slavery and Liberty,” and reminded his audience that “it lies with you whether it shall be a victory of Slavery or a victory of Liberty.”17

The following month, the German-American Arbeiterbund held a mass meeting in New

York which passed resolutions blaming the passage of Kansas-Nebraska on the triumph of

“capitalism and land speculation... at the expense of the mass of the people,” declaring its

17 “Voice of the Workingmen of New York,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 25 February 1854; quoted in Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., Northern Labor and Antislavery: A Documentary History (New York: Praeger, 1994), 247-50.

312 hostility to both black and “white” slavery, and branding supporters of the bill as “traitors[s] against the people.”18 Two days later, an anti-Nebraska meeting organized by the Arbeiter Verein drew a crowd of 2,000 to hear speakers at Washington Hall on Elizabeth Street. The German-

American speakers scarcely hesitated to connect the Nebraska bill’s potential to nationalize slavery with the cherished goal of homestead reform, then once again making its way through

Congress. Dr. Kellner, a refugee from Kassel who edited the Marx-inflected Reform, spoke of

“the interests which the laboring classes have in the question now before the meeting,” focusing on the bill’s attempt “to exclude free labor from this soil in order to devote it to Slavery.” A Mr.

Rosenstein insisted that “there has never been a German, who really was a German, who desired to be a slaveholder,” and prayed that the territories be kept free from “the curse of Slavery.”

Wilhelm Schlutter complained that the intractability of southern congressmen had resulted in the current Homestead bill’s watered-down version of land reform; regardless, both Homestead and more radical land reform had been undermined by the Nebraska legislation. Likening the bill’s author, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, to the monarchs and despots of Europe, Schlutter called for “Revolution!” to cheers from the audience, before clarifying the kind of revolution he had in mind: the election of men to Congress “that will dare to tell the slave-breeders to their faces who they are.” Even George Dietz, the former editor of the Democratic and anti-abolitionist Staats

Zeitung, was forced to disavow his former southern and Democratic allies, blaming them for bringing on “the storm that now shakes the very foundation of this Union.”19 In the weeks and

18 Hermann Schlüter, Lincoln, Labor, and Slavery: A Chapter from the Social History of America (New York: Socialist Literature Company, 1913), 75–76. German and Irish names were conspicuously absent from the list of artisans, manufacturers, and ordinary laborers who signed the Tribune’s earlier call for the Tabernacle meeting on February 18th. For the meeting’s proceedings, see the New-York Tribune, “The Nebraska Fraud,” 20 Feb 1854, p. 4. 19 “The People’s Meeting, to Protest Against Slavery in Nebraska,” New-York Tribune 17 Feb 1854; “The Voice of the North. No Slavery Extension. The Nebraska Bill Among the Germans. Great Meeting in Washington Hall—Enthusiastic Demonstration,” New-York Tribune, 6 March 1854.

313 months to come, German workingmen would continue to rally around the slogan “Kansas gehört der Arbeit, nicht der Sklaverei.”20

The fallout over Kansas-Nebraska continued to reverberate in workingmen’s circles throughout that summer. A Fourth of July “Memorial for the support of liberty,” penned by the

NRA’s Lewis Masquerier and signed by the “democratic citizens of Greenpoint and Bushwick” in Brooklyn denounced Kansas-Nebraska’s “repeal of the Missouri restriction,” and demanded the “instant repeal” of both it and the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as slavery’s “ultimate abolition.”21 At the National Industrial Congress in Trenton, New Jersey, that June, the body was forced to confront the now-unavoidable issue of slavery in the territories head-on. With

Yorkshire-born Philadelphia tailor John Sheddon in the chair, the Congress passed the usual resolutions in favor of freedom of the public lands, alongside those protesting land giveaways to railroads and supporting term limits and the direct election of Senators—the latter a clear sign of dissatisfaction with the political ruling class in the wake of the Senate’s simultaneous failure to pass homestead legislation and approval of Kansas-Nebraska.22

The most heated debate at the NIC that summer was reserved for resolutions that responded directly to the so-called “Nebraska bill.” As New Jersey delegate and Trenton Daily

20 Commons, History of Labour Vol. II, 619-20. See also Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and Abolitionists After 1848 (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 2011). 21 “Memorial of democratic citizens of Greenpoint and Bushwick, N. York, demanding the repeal of the fugitive Slave law and the restoration of the ‘Missouri restriction,” July 12, 1854. Orderd to lie on the table.” National Archives, Senate Records, 33A–J2, J4, (33rd Cong. 1st Sess.). Of the twenty-five signers whose occupations could be identified in the 1856 Brooklyn City Directory, seventeen worked as artisans, semi-skilled, or unskilled laborers. Masquerier also advocated that Nebraska be colonized with free labor communties on the National Reform plan. See Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience, 271 n.107 22 The career of John Sheddon (whose name was misspelled “Shedden” in the New York Daily Times’ coverage of the Congress) spanned nearly the entire gamut of nineteenth-century labor activism. Involved with the Chartist movement in Britain, after the Civil War he became an officer of the Philadelphia branch of the International Workingmen’s Association; the president of the Sovereigns of Industry, a cooperative movement of urban workers inspired by the Grangers; and unsuccessfully ran for Congress on the Republican-Greenback-Labor ticket in 1878. Steve Leiken, The Practical Utopians: American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the Gilded Age (: Wayne State University Press, 2005) 13, 19; Lause, A Secret Society History, 25; Lause, Young America, 131.

314 News editor Franklin S. Mills explained, the delegates “were all agreed that Kansas and

Nebraska ought to be settled by free people.” But a series of strongly-worded resolutions introduced by Philadelphian T.W. Braidwood and delegate Henderson of New York created considerable rancor within the body. After a preamble that proclaimed that “the moral sense of this nation is outraged, and the spirit of freedom... lies smothering beneath the suffocating grasp of Slavery,” the resolutions demanded the immediate repeal of Kansas-Nebraska and the

Fugitive Slave Act and the resignation of those northern congressmen who had helped to pass them, and insisted that all future state and national representatives pledge themselves “to resist the aggression of the Southern Slave power.” Another resolution framed the fugitive issue in terms of states’ rights—specifically, northern states’ rights, which Braidwood, in common with many northerners, felt had been violated by the Fugitive Act. Another declared the body’s sympathies, as “freemen,” with both the “oppressed” southern slave and the “fugitive freeman,”

“whom we swear to protect by the rights of our States and the strength of our arms.” A separate resolution offered by Henderson proposed the formation of “Emigrant Associations” to resettle newly-arrived immigrants from Ireland and Germany in Kansas and Nebraska, “as a preventative to the extension of the piratical system of Slavery in those vast regions.”23

Reaction to the resolutions was swift, but far from unanimous. N.W. Brown of

Massachusetts was opposed to “any action upon such inflammatory resolutions,” while Franklin

Mills apparently “considered it injudicious in the Congress to mix itself up in the political broils of the country.” Delaware’s S.G. Laws similarly felt that if the resolutions were passed as worded, “this Congress would be resolving itself into an Abolition Society, under a false name.”

But New York’s David Marsh, citing the recent anti-Nebraska demonstration of German

23 “Industrial Congress,” New York Daily Times, 9, 10, 12 June 1854.

315 workingmen as proof that the tide of northern sentiment had turned against slavery, thought that the Congress should be free to “give expression” to its anti-slavery impulses, “feeling as they all should, that wherever Slavery was allowed free labor was degraded.” A Pennsylvania delegate likewise overcame his initial reservations, and “now believed that the Congress would do best by openly avowing its principles on the Slave question,” since “they could gain nothing by temporizing with an institution that was inimical to all the rights of free labor.” George F.

Gordon of Philadelphia had what proved to be the last word. Any attempt to “engraft upon this

Congress the doctrines of the Abolitionists” would be voted down, he believed; but still, “it seemed to him that the constitution of their body did not forbid the discussion of questions in favor of universal freedom.” Moreover, “as Land Reformers,” the members of the Industrial

Congress “had more to do with Slavery than they might at first think.” The passage of Kansas-

Nebraska represented a direct threat to their interests, since “any State given over to the Slave power was rendered unfit for free labor.”24

In the end, only the resolutions demanding Kansas-Nebraska’s repeal, framing the issue in terms of states’ rights, and blaming immigrant voters for “sustaining Southern tyranny” were passed, while a subsequent resolution censuring lawmakers for repealing the Missouri

Compromise was stripped of some of its more inflammatory language. But Henderson’s resolution, although shorn of its politicized denunciation of “the trickery of Senators DOUGLAS

& CO.,” passed with additional language about rescuing Kansas and Nebraska from “the machinations of the Slave power,” making clear that the NIC “consider[ed] the system of involuntary servitude inimical to the interests of the laboring man.”25 A majority report by the

24 Ibid., 12 June 1854. 25 The full resolution, as passed, read: “That we recommend our fellow industrials and the European emigrants now landing upon our shores to settle upon the fertile soil of Kansas and Nebraska, and thus rescue it from the machinations of the

316 Business Committee resolved to send the Congress’s compliments to William Seward, Salmon

Chase, Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Gerrit Smith, and Andrew Johnson, prevailing over a minority report that favored recognizing only Johnson. And the body chose to inscribe its banner with a slogan similar to that of the Free Soilers in 1848 and the Republican party organizations beginning to take shape in 1854, that read in part “Free Homes, Land Limitations, Free Schools,

Free Speech, [and] a Free Soil for Free Men...”26

Several factors, in addition to opposition by individual delegates, help explain why the

1854 Industrial Congress ultimately adopted a more cautious stance on Kansas-Nebraska than that represented by Braidwood’s initial resolutions. For one, and most obviously, the leadership, and even the rank-and-file delegates, of the Congress in 1854 was nearly completely different from that of 1848 or even 1851. With the possible exception of Sheddon, labor leaders whose roots lay in the workingmen’s movements of the 1820s and 30s, like Evans and John

Commerford, were entirely absent. Likewise missing were former Fourierists and social reformers like L.W. Ryckman or Lewis Masquerier, and speakers or delegates with strong abolitionist ties, like William H. Channing, Alvan Bovay, or Charles Durkee. Although several delegates represented organizations, like the Brotherhood of the Union, that supported land reform, only one represented the National Reform Association as such. Also significant is the fact that the sponsor of the most stringent anti-Nebraska resolutions, T.W. Braidwood, was known as a firm nativist. Whatever their pro-southern or anti-abolitionist prejudices,

Braidwood’s antagonists may have also feared further alienating their immigrant constituencies,

Slaver power, as we consider the system of involuntary servitude inimical to the interests of the laboring man.” An attempt by a delegate from Delaware to strike out the words after “Nebraska” failed. New York Daily Times, 12 June 1854. 26 Ibid.

317 already chary of abolitionism.27 Lastly, the Congress’s location in New Jersey, the last northern state to abolish slavery, meant that delegates from the central and southern areas of that state, as well as from slaveholding Delaware, wielded an outsize influence over the proceedings.28

In any event, the National Industrial Congress was nearly finished as a viable vehicle for genuine reform. Perhaps in a rebuke to the anti-abolitionists at the Trenton Congress, the 1855

NIC in Cleveland featured a prominent local black leader, William H. Day, as one of three of the meeting’s secretaries, along with Sheddon and agricultural reformer John H. Klippart. But although the Congresses would straggle on until 1860—and would later be revived, albeit in altered form, after the Civil War—by 1856 the NIC was a shadow of its former self; held in New

York that year, it attracted only eleven attendees.29

27 Braidwood was the male teacher of a women’s school who became the leader of Philadelphia’s Working Women’s Relief Association during the war. In addition to the resolution chastising immigrants for sustaining “southern tyranny,” Braidwood had earlier declared his intention to sponsor anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant resolutions at the Congress, including one taking aim at “the Romish hierarchy,” and another recommending a fifteen-year naturalization period. He may have also alienated fellow delegates with his refusal to support a resolution memorializing George Lippard, the recently-deceased founder of the Brotherhood of the Union who was popular among many labor reformers, particularly those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Although the relationship of nativism to antislavery, and to the emerging Republican Party, remains a hotly-contested topic within the literature on the politics of the 1850s, what is beyond dispute is that the short-lived success of the nativist American Party overlapped considerably with the advent of Free Soil and Republicanism in states like Massachusetts thereby providing another obstacle to antislavery efforts to solicit the support of workingmen. See Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 275–80; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 162–278; Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 371–78. Although many native-born workers also embraced the Know-Nothings, nativism was generally anathema to the more progressive wing of labor reforme, perhaps as much to long- naturalized immigrants like George Henry Evans and William Heighton as to the German and Irish newcomers they hoped to rally to their cause. 28 The Trenton Congress was the southernmost of the Industrial Congresses, with the exception of that held in Washington, D.C. in 1852. Of the recorded delegates in attendance, eighteen were from Philadelphia, seventeen from New Jersey, eleven from Delaware, and one from Massachusetts. Of the two major leaders of the opposition to strongly-antislavery resolutions, F.S. Mills was a Democratic editor who was elected Mayor of Trenton a half-dozen times (Mills evidently profited from his political career, erecting a three-story brick house in 1859 at a cost of $2,600). S. G. Laws, from slaveholding Delaware, described himself as a “subtreasury, hard money Democrat of the Tom Benton school.” John W. Cleary, A History of Trenton: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of a Notable Town with Links in Four Centuries (Trenton Historical Society, 1929); Daily True American, “Index to the Year 1859” (both from Trenton Historical Society.org); S.G. Laws to Polk, Aug 6 1845; Wayne Cutler, ed., Correspondence of James K. Polk, Vol. X, July–December 1845 (Knoxville: UT Press, 2004), 124. 29 Lause, Young America, 119; New-York Tribune, June 8, 1855, Cleveland Morning Leader, June 8, June 6, 1855; New York Daily Times, 6 June 1856. One of the eleven attendees in 1856 was the indefatigable Fannie Lee Townsend. John Evans served as Chair, J.K. Ingalls as Secretary. Between 1866 and 1875, annual gatherings of trades union representatives were held, first under the name the , and subsequently as the Industrial Congress. See Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 181.

318 Nor was the Industrial Congress was not the only entity to suffer a loss of credibility in the aftermath of Kansas-Nebraska. Gerrit Smith had been elected to the House of

Representatives by a coalition of Democrats, Free Democrats, and antislavery Whigs in 1853.

Although Smith arguably owed his election to upstate New York businessmen who hoped that

Smith’s free trade orthodoxy would boost their prospects of trade with Canada, his election was attended with high hopes among both abolitionists and land reformers. They would soon be disappointed: Smith’s stubborn idealism, so inspiring to his supporters, served him poorly in

Congress. Although he gave a stirring speech on the Homestead bill and signed the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” in response to Kansas-Nebraska, Smith failed to be an effective advocate for antislavery during his tenure in office. Stubbornly committed to abstract principles regarding his own understanding of the democratic process, Smith refused to take part in a procedural effort to table the Nebraska bill and prevent it from being voted on, infuriating other antislavery Congressmen—including Horace Greeley, who then excoriated him in the pages of the Tribune. In the confused aftermath of the vote, the Tribune first reported—inaccurately, as it turned out—that Smith had voted for the measure, then that he had failed to vote at all. The paper later corrected its statements, but the damage to Smith’s credibility had been done. The passage of Kansas-Nebraska, and the ensuing debacle with the Tribune, proved to be a turning point for

Smith; he subsequently relinquished any remaining faith in the to bring about a

“bloodless termination of American slavery.” Smith resigned his seat shortly after President

Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May, and thereafter became what he termed a

“confessed revolutionist.”30

30 Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 174–75; 177–80; Gerrit Smith, Homes for All: Speech of Gerrit Smith, on the Homestead Bill, In Congress, February 21, 1854 (Washington, D.C.: Buell and Blanchard, 1854); Speeches of Gerrit Smith in Congress (New York: Mason Brothers, 1856). For Smith’s defense of his actions on the Nebraska bill and his response to the Tribune’s slander, see Controversy between the New-York Tribune and Gerrit Smith (New York: John A. Gray, 1855). For commentary on the episode by Garrisonians, see the Liberator, 19 October 1855.

319 Although a bare majority of northern “doughfaces” had caved in to southern pressure to approve Kansas-Nebraska, pro-land reform Democrats like William H. Seward, Salmon Chase, and Galusha Grow proved to be among the measure’s most strident antagonists.31 Although these

Democrats generally approved of the ostensibly democratic notion of popular sovereignty, many, like Free Soiler Edward Wade, insisted that popular sovereignty should not override the right to self-ownership.32 Neither, land reformers might have added, did it supersede the “right to the soil.” Even doughface Democrats like the bill’s architect, Stephen Douglas, were uncomfortable with the absolute right to slave property that southern representatives insisted Kansas-Nebraska now sanctioned. For these Democrats, the democratic principles embodied by popular sovereignty (which they strove to distinguish from mere “squatter sovereignty”) outweighed the unconditional property rights demanded by southerners.33 In a speech on the bill a few months after its passage, Galusha Grow outlined a powerful antislavery argument, predicated on the same demand that individual property rights, under certain circumstances, must be subordinated to the greater good—an argument that had long been made by land and labor reformers. The territories, Grow maintained, were “the common property of the whole people,” but by agreeing to be ruled under the Constitution, the people had agreed to place such property under the authority of Congress, which served as a supervisory “board of direction.” Since Congress had an obligation to promote settlement of the territories in such a way as best calculated to promote

31 On the role of northern “doughfaces” and the rise of the “Slave Power” conspiracy in the North, see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 32 Wade, May 17, 1854, Congressional Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Appendix, 843; quoted in Huston, Calculating the Value of Union, 199. As Huston points out, even doughface Democrats like Douglas insisted that the democratic rights inherent in the doctrine of popular sovereignty superseded the right to property insisted on by slaveholders. 33 Jonathan A. Glickstein has described the demands for the recognition of absolute property in slaves as the “Achilles’ heel” of popular sovereignty; which push came to shove, Glickstein suggests, most Democrats insisted on the primacy of popular sovereignty over property. Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 199–200.

320 the general interest, settlers were obligated to “conform to the ‘rules and regulations’” it established. But claims that the Federal Government was bound to recognize certain a “species of property” carried into the territories—slave property—carried no such obligation. Since national law did not recognize slavery, and since slavery could only exist where state and local laws gave sanction to it, the Federal Government was only obligated to protect that property which “the of the country recognizes as property, and nothing else, till there is local legislation.” Since enslaved human beings were “an anomalous species of property, not recognized by the common law,” slaveholders “must submit to whatever inconveniences are incident to that species of property wherever you may take it.”34

Citing authorities from Prigg v Pennsylvania to Henry Clay to Lord Mansfield’s decision in the famous Somerset case of 1772, the implications of Grow’s case against Kansas-Nebraska was clear: no legal or constitutional right to carry slave property into the territories existed.

Instead of blaming the representatives of northern free labor for failing to uphold their obligations under the Constitution, southern slaveholders “should rather blame nature, and reason, and the common law of the land” for the groundswell of popular resistance to recognition of an absolute and nationally-recognized right to slave property.35

Kansas-Nebraska may have also played a role in reorienting, temporarily at least, the focus of white workingmen’s fears of “competition” with enslaved labor from the cities of the

North to the open spaces and free soil of the West. Competition between white and free African

American laborers continued and in some ways intensified in northern cities during the 1850s and 60s, especially amongst dockworkers and other “unskilled” trades, and on the eve of

34 Galusha Grow, Nebraska and Kansas: Speech of Hon. G.A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, in the House of Representatives, May 10, 1854 (Washington, D.C.: 1854). 35 Ibid.

321 Lincoln’s election, the New York Herald warned Irish and German workers that, should Lincoln succeed, “you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes... The

North will be flooded with free Negroes, and the labor of the white man will be depreciated and degraded.”36 Nor were Republican or labor movement appeals to “free labor” and “free soil” free from racial overtones or from outright racism.37 An anonymous 1856 pamphlet addressed to workingmen in New Haven was typical in oscillating between claims about the superiority and dignity of free labor and racially-charged warnings about the Nebraska bill’s alleged ulterior motive to bring in “NEGROES to drive out free labor in the United States Territories,” thus presenting the prospect of northern labor forced to “work side by side with negro slaves.” But the same pamphlet also painted the issue in class terms, urging supporters of the “true democracy” to spurn the efforts of “artful men” who “live mostly in handsome houses and wear fine clothes,” but “care little how poor you may be, if they can only get you to vote away your rich lands in the West to the slaveholders whom they serve.” The true policy, the New Haven pamphlet affirmed, was that of the “honest Democrats”—by which it meant Republicans, if the following invocation of a favorite Republican doctrine is any indication—“who... declare and maintain that while Slavery is sectional, FREEDOM IS NATIONAL.”38

An “Address of the Working Men of Pittsburgh,” published the same year, likewise prioritized over racial conflict. The several hundred Pittsburgh workingmen who

36 Quoted in Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 12. On competition between African American and white workers in the antebellum and Civil War periods, see the above, 10–16; David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 147–50. 37 For a recent interpretation of Lincoln and the Republican Party’s de-emphasis of racial equality and its relationship to Republican antislavery, see Manisha Sinha, “Lincoln’s Competing Political Loyalties: Antislavery, Union, and the Constitution,” in Nicholas Buccola, ed., Abraham Lincoln and (University Press of Kansas, 2016): 164–191. For an older interpretation of the Free Soilers, see Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the Free Soil Party,” in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. 38 Leaflet addressed to the “Workingmen of New Haven,” (ca. 1856), collection of Yale University, quoted in Foner and Shapiro, eds., Northern Labor and Abolition, 245–46.

322 signed the address were convinced alike both that “our interests as a class are seriously involved in the present political struggle” and that the rights of free labor were “in great peril.” The South lay in the hands of “a practical aristocracy, owning Labor... With them, Labor is servitude, and

Freedom is only compatible with mastership.” After this aristocracy had finished extending the slave system over the territories and gained supreme control of the government, the Working

Men warned, “they will extend it over us.” In a passage that recalled the free-labor political economists of the 1820s and 30s, the “Address” further warned that unchecked slaveholder expansionism threatened to

cover thousands of acres with slave tillage, finding new lands again when those he holds are desolated by this baneful system... the broad Western plains are to be taken from the free workingman, although, with this refuge gone, low wages and dependence must be his portion. Shut out from Slave Territories... his condition in the overcrowded Free States soon resembles that of the workingman of Europe. Low wages for freeman that slavery may be profitable! Is this equality?39

Slavery was now the “overshadowing issue, dwarfing all minor questions,” and demanding a final settlement that required uniting with “the friends of Freedom of whatever name or party.”

To confront the danger, workingmen must turn away from both their “natural” inclinations towards the Democratic Party, with its newfound doctrines of popular sovereignty and non- interference with slavery, as well as from Know-Nothing attempts to curry favor with native- born workingmen. Only the Republicans offered “the true platform”; one that combined a democratic commitment to the rights of man with a republican pledge to secure the fruits of labor. 40

39 “Address of the Working Men of Pittsburgh to Their Fellow Working Men of Pennsylvania,” New York Tribune, 31 October 1856; quoted in Foner and Shapiro, eds., Northern Labor and Antislavery, 242–44. 40 Ibid.

323 The Republican Appeal to Labor: Homestead, Land Grant Colleges, and the Protective Tariff

The course of the second Homestead bill to make its way through Congress was fatefully linked to the passage of Kansas-Nebraska. By 1854, most southern senators had moved towards implacable opposition to the bill, for obvious reasons: they feared that farmers and immigrants from the North would overwhelmingly be the ones to take advantage of the bill’s provision for the creation of small, 160-acre farms, to the exclusion of slave plantations.41 Other southerners pointed to the disproportionate burden of the costs of giving away free land on the South; the

South’s underdeveloped manufacturing sector and import-dependent economy meant that it paid more than its share of the revenue that would have funded the land giveaway, while the homestead bill would drain southern population by luring away landless and non-slaveowning farmers. Even those southerners who had supported homestead measures, like Robert Johnson of

Arkansas, refused to vote for the bill until after the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been passed, at which point they assumed that Kansas-Nebraska’s sanction to slavery north of the 36°30’ line provided a sufficient counterweight to the threat posed by free farms.42

In response to the failure of the 1854 bill—it passed the House, only to be stymied in the

Senate—Horace Greeley and other land reform supporters stepped up efforts to blame southern

41 Although the historian Gerald Wolff wrote to dispute the idea of a “solid South” voted against the Homestead bill in 1854, his own findings lend support to the notion that Homestead was essentially a sectional issue, with important connections to the slavery issue, by 1854. In a measure of nine votes on various aspects of the bill, 39.3% of southern senators took strongly “anti” positions, while only 15.3% of northerners did so. Likewise, 69.3% of northern senators were strongly “pro,” while only 17.8% of southerners were. Among the senators with the strongest pro-Homestead voting records were Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Salmon Chase, and Isaac Walker. In contrast to the vote on Kansas-Nebraska, northern Whigs tended to align with southerners in opposing the bill. Gerald Wolff, “The Slavocracy and the Homestead Problem of 1854,” Agricultural History Vol. 40, No. 2 (April, 1966): 101–112. 42 Despite being a longtime supporter of Homestead measures, Johnson nonetheless refused to vote for the bill on May 8th, 1854, because, as he said, it was “tinctured... so strongly with abolitionism”; after Kansas-Nebraska’s passage only weeks later, he changed his mind. Gerald Wolff, “The Slavocracy and the Homestead Problem of 1854,” Agricultural History Vol. 40, No. 2 (April, 1966): 102–05, 107–09. Although Wolff concludes that “a selfishly united slavocracy was not to blame” for the failure of the homestead bill in 1854, his findings nonetheless underscore that southern opposition, especially from the older slave states of the Southeast, was the biggest factor in homestead’s defeat. See also James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 193-94.

324 intransigence for the impasse, while prodding the newly-formed Republicans to incorporate support for Homestead as an official party policy. Greeley’s earlier effort, described above, to pass a Homestead bill during his brief tenure in Congress had failed, but he had continued to serve as an effective and tenacious advocate of land reform in the pages of the Tribune. In 1855,

Greeley sat on the platform committee of the Republican state convention in Syracuse, New

York, where he penned a resolution that demanded free land for actual settlers. Greeley’s resolution was defeated by the New York party, and although Homestead was absent from the

Republican national platform in 1856, the Philadelphia convention that year cemented opposition to the further extension of slavery as the cornerstone of Republican policy. Furthermore, the

1856 convention upheld the constitutional authority of Congress over the territories, an important prerequisite for both the proscription of slavery and the establishment of homesteads, and nominated John C. Frémont, a figure popularly associated with free soil and the West.43

Four years later, in Chicago, Greeley and other pro-Homestead Republicans had more success. Although Greeley’s precise role in writing the 1860 platform remains unclear, he claimed shortly thereafter that the Homestead plank that it contained was “fixed exactly to my own liking.”44 Without outlining a specific proposal, Article 12 made it clear that the party stood

“against any sale or alienation to others of the Public Lands held by actual settlers” and demanded the passage of the latest version of the homestead bill, then pending in the Senate.

Although the 1860 platform failed to enshrine access to the soil as a natural right, it recalled the dissent from earlier, more moderate homestead proposals by placing itself in opposition to “any

43 Robbins, “Horace Greeley,” 37; The American Presidency Project, “Republican Party Platform of 1856,” June 18, 1856; http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29619, accessed 23 August 2016. 44 Horace Greeley to Schuyler Colfax, June 20, 1860, Greeley-Colfax Papers, NYPL. Roy Marvin Robbins also believed that Greeley “probably” wrote the party’s homestead plank in 1860. Regardless, Greeley expended considerable effort at Chicago in convincing doubtful Republicans to include the measure. Robbins, “Horace Greeley,” 40.

325 view of the Homestead policy which regards the settlers as paupers or suppliants for public bounty.”45

Greeley was also instrumental in effecting the Republican transformation of another long-cherished measure into something the party hoped would prove palatable to workingmen.

Greeley had been prescient in his perception that the Whigs needed to modernize their economic program in order to accommodate the changing economic realities of the growth of factory labor, the influx of massive numbers of immigrants, and the shifting economic alliance between eastern manufacturers and western consumers—a perception which fueled his support for land reform, a departure from Whig orthodoxy for which he had nearly been read out of the party in the 1840s.

Both Greeley’s faith in the harmony of interests and his longstanding belief in an active role for government in economic matters led him to push for the protective tariff, another keystone of

Republican national policy. But in doing so, Greeley challenged both the longstanding

Democratic hostility towards meddling with “free trade” and the traditional Whig pro-tariff argument as a measure that benefitted employers and manufacturers in favor of one that pointed out their benefits to labor. Building on the work of Whig political economist Henry Carey,

Greeley defended the tariff’s violation of laissez faire political economy, as he had with ten- hours laws, land reform, other prolabor measures, by emphasizing its benefits to workers.46 To

Greeley, the protective tariff and Homestead measures were mutually reinforcing. Although he freely admitted that “a protective tariff cannot redress all wrongs,” this, in Greeley’s view, made the need for land reform measures, hours of labor laws, and others interventions into the regimes of private property and the market were all the more apparent. To Greeley and other like-minded

45 Ibid. 46 Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s Tribune, 39, 184–85; James L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Weekly Tribune, 16 October, 1847.

326 Republicans, free homesteads and protective tariffs represented not only a means to countermand the Slave Power and strike a blow for free labor, but a just and relatively painless way to realize a principle Greeley had long cherished, the notion of a “harmony of interests” between labor and capital. Accordingly, the Tribune framed Homestead as flush with benefits for both the propertied and propertyless: “We believe the passage of this bill would add tens of thousands immediately, and hundreds of thousands ultimately, to the number of our producers of wealth, subtracting from the number of our paupers and the famishing crowd vainly struggling for employment in the great cities. There is not a merchant, a manufacturer, an owner of city property, who would not ultimately share in the signal and enduring benefits which the passage of the Homestead bill would secure to the Free Laboring Class of our whole country.”47 The measures were mutually reinforcing, since Homestead would allow reform-minded politicians to

“appeal forcibly to the of the New States for Protection to the exposed Industry of their

Atlantic brethren by whom they have been dealt with generously.”48

The Panic of 1857, blamed by Greeley and other protectionists on the downward revision of the Walker Tariff by congressional Democrats the previous March, furnished additional ammunition for pro-tariff arguments aimed at workingmen. In Pennsylvania, where the Panic had exacerbated the deleterious effects of Walker Tariff on the iron industry, Republicans held a rally for “Protection to American Labor,” arguing that higher tariffs would lead to higher wages and the “elevation of the masses”; in the Tribune, Greeley suggested that it would lead to the employment of “thousands.” Such appeals appear to have met with some success, at least in

Pennsylvania, where the Republicans routed the Democrats in congressional elections in the fall

47 New-York Tribune, “The Homestead Bill,” 2 March 1859. Although Adam Tuchinsky has recently claimed that the 1848 revolutions had shaken Greeley’s faith in the harmony of interests, it is far from clear that he ever fully relinquished the idea. Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’ Tribune, 82–107. 48 Tribune, 27 March 1845; 9 March 1849.

327 of 1858, and in Ohio, where Rep. John Sherman was told that “three fifths of the laboring people want land and a tariff.”49 The Republican Party’s 1860 platform emphasized the tariff’s mutual advantages to employers and producers, and commended a foreign trade policy “which secures to the working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor, and enterprise,” and the party gave its policy of “Protection to American Industry” a prominent place alongside promises of “Free

Homes” and “Free Territory” in its broadsides and campaign material, often replete with “bone- and-sinew” homilies to the workingman.50

A Homestead bill again made it through the House in 1859, only to be killed in the

Senate. Again, Greeley and other Republicans blamed the failure of Homestead squarely on the

Slave Power. The bill, which the Tribune had described as “a moderate and cautious one,” (it provided for the sale of quarter sections of public land at $1.25 and acre, without limitation or alienability), had passed by an overwhelming margin in the House, only to be defeated by southern Senators who defeated a measure to take up the bill. As the Tribune observed, only two southerners and only nine Democrats from either section had voted to take up the bill in the

Senate; twenty-three of the twenty-nine votes against consideration had come from southern

Senators. Although the Tribune remained confident that passage of Homestead was only a matter of time, it suggested to readers that “if there be any one not yet convinced that Gov. Seward was correct in affirming an ‘irrepressible conflict’ in this country between the Free Labor and Slave

49 James L. Huston, “A Political Response to Industrialism: The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrines,” Journal of Amercan History, Vol. 70, No. 1 (June, 1983), 50–52; Sean Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 723; Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 357. See also Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War. 50 Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, 184–86; Huston, “A Political Response to Industrialism”; “Republican Party Platform of 1860: May 17, 1860,” The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29620; W.M. Rease, “The Union Must, and Shall Be Preserved” [Lincoln presidential campaign broadside], (Philadelphia, 1860).

328 Labor systems... we beg him to study closely the history of the struggle for Land Reform.”51 The following year, yet another Homestead bill finally made it past both houses, but was vetoed by

President Buchanan. A similar fate awaited the Morrill Act, which proposed setting aside a portion of the public lands within each state for the establishment of colleges to provide education in “such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The fruit of decades of agitation by workingmen, abolitionists, and others who advocated universal education and “manual labor schools,” the Morrill Act, also known as the Land Grant College

Act, had been guided through both houses of Congress by Illinois’ , only to face

Buchanan’s veto. Greeley claimed that both vetoes were the work of “Mr. Buchanan’s Southern masters,” and contrasted the president’s lack of “sympathy with the poor” with the Republican presidential candidate whose humble origins had already become the stuff of Republican myth- making. “Does anybody suppose,” the Tribune rhetorically asked its readers, “that Abraham

Lincoln would ever veto such a bill?”52 Other Republican orators, like New Hampshire’s James

A. Briggs, attacked “Democrats who affect to be above all aristocratic notions, [and] sneer at

Lincoln, because he was a rail splitter,” and hinted to listeners that “Uncle Sam was rich enough to give us all a farm but if he filled up his territories with servile hosts he crowds out freemen.”53

Greeley had Galusha Grow’s House speech on Homestead from that February printed up in pamphlet form; the pamphlet’s introduction framed Grow’s oration as an example of “the

Republican policy of granting the Public Lands in limited tracts to actual settlers.” Over the next several months, Greeley relentlessly pushed the party to publicize its position on land reform as a means of getting Lincoln elected. The Tribune informed readers that “the best single step” that

51 Tribune, “The Homestead Bill,” 2 March 1859 52 Ibid., 30 June 1860. 53 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 7 September 1860; quoted in Mark A. Lause, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 20.

329 friends of the party could take to persuade northern farmers and laborers to vote Republican “is, in our judgment, the circulation of documents which show just where the two great parties stand on the vital question of LAND REFORM”; the Tribune recommended the publication of “One

Million copies” of an expanded tract on land reform, and Republican campaign organs like the

Rail Splitter published column after column emphasizing the Republicans’ commitment to

Homestead. An E. Smalley wrote to the Rail Splitter to identify himself as “one of the originators of the ‘Land Reform Party’” in Chicago, and pronounced himself “fully satisfied that the passage of a liberal Homestead Law would settle the question of slavery in the territories.” “There is not a shoemaker’s shop in America, much less a machine-shop or foundry,” the Tribune claimed, “in which that tract alone will not make votes for the Republican ticket, provided there be any voters there who are not already Republicans... We can carry the Election on Land Reform alone, if we shall only have made nearly every voter see and realize just what Land Reform is, and how the two great parties respectively stand upon it.”54

Anecdotal evidence suggests that such appeals did have an impact, at least among leading labor reformers. As with the Liberty Party and Free Soil Party defections of 1847–48, the adoption of free soil and land reform principles by a mainstream political party was enough to secure the support of most of the leading land and labor reformers, and to some extent, of the organizations they represented. The remnants of the National Reform Association endorsed John

Frémont in 1856, and National Reformer Lewis Ryckman ran for state assembly as a Republican.

J.K. Ingalls and Lewis Masquerier also became stalwart Republicans, as did Ingalls’ employer,

John Keyser, who served as a delegate to the 1856 Republican National Convention.55 At the final prewar Industrial Congress in 1860, the body’s acting president expressed his view that “it

54 “The Work to Be Done,” New-York Tribune, 7 Jan 1860; The Rail Splitter, July 1, 1860, 55 Tribune May 29, 1856.

330 would not be wise to form a new and distinct political party in view of the success of the outside pressure of the land reformers upon the republican party as to the Homestead bill.”56 The die- hard Democrat Thomas Devyr campaigned for Gerrit Smith’s quixotic 1858 run for governor, even as he urged Democrats to adopt homestead as a campaign issue. Perhaps the biggest coup among New York labor radicals was the defection of John Commerford, one of the original leaders of the New York Working Men’s revolt of 1829. In late 1859, Commerford had warned

Andrew Johnson that “in the next Presidential Contest, I shall have to cast my ballot for the

Republican Candidate.” The following year, he made good on that threat, and more: in October

1860 he won his district’s nomination as the Republican candidate for Congress. Although

Commerford lost the race, his campaign stirred up enthusiasm among New York’s radical workingmen, with a torchlight procession featuring delegations from groups like the German

Kommunist Klub and the “Garibaldi Wide-Awakes.”57

The limited available evidence suggests, however, that Republican appeals to urban workingmen were only partially effective. Party strategists, while never abandoning hope for capturing the large cities, mostly agreed that the Republicans’ strength lay among “the farmers and mechanics,—moral & religious men” in the “rural districts.”58 Lingering associations with

Nativism kept many Catholic immigrants away, and racist demagoguery by Democrats, who relentlessly portrayed Lincoln as the candidate of the “Black Republican” party, were enough to sway many urban workers. In New York City, the successful Democratic mayoral candidate

Fernando Wood combined hints that the city might secede from the Union with a public-works

56 New York Herald, Nov 24 1860. The president of the NIC that year was Dr. J.E. Snodgrass. 57 Lause, Young America, 121; “The Homestead and the Union,” quoted in Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 188 fn 15, 16 ; Commerford to Johnson, Dec 17, 1859, quoted in Lause, Young America, 121; Lause, Free Labor, 21. 58 Ovid Miner to William H. Seward, June 16, 1856, Seward Papers, quoted in William E. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party: 1852–1856 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 437. After the 1856 election, an Ohio newspaper summed up the results as “The Country for Freedom—the Cities for Slavery,” Ohio State Journal, November 7, 1856; quoted in Foner, Free Soil, 35, n59.

331 program largely co-opted from the city’s labor movement. Yet among certain groups of urban workers, the Republicans made significant gains. In the border city of Cincinnati, the largest percentages of both skilled laborers and those owning only modest amounts of property voted for the Republicans by significant margins in 1856, a margin that probably increased in 1860.

German immigrant votes for Republicans increased substantially between 1856 and 1860, and

German-Americans, most of them skilled workers and small farmers, may have provided the margin of victory in Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, as well as in border state cities like St.

Louis.59 Throughout 1860, pro-Republican mass meetings of “workingmen and mechanics” were held in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, Newark, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis, and even in border-South cities like St. Louis, Richmond, Memphis, and Louisville, Kentucky.60

Another plank in the Republican Party’s platform, however, might help to explain why the Republicans may have failed to attract propertyless urban wage workers in substantial numbers, despite the defection of some of the most prominent labor leaders and reformers.

Although the party had yet to become the “party of business,” as it would be known after the

Civil War, its associations with former Whigs and pro-business conservatives were conspicuous from the beginning. The 1856 and 1860 platforms both called for federal assistance to railroads, and Republicans relentlessly pursued the passage of a bill to establish a transcontinental railroad, enabled by grants to railroad companies of huge tracts of public lands [also funded by land sales?]. The Pacific Railway Act, the Morrill Act, and the Homestead Act were all signed by

59 Table 13.38, “Estimated Percentages between Voting for President 1856 and occupation 1860: Cincinnati” and Table 13.39, “Estimated Percentages between Voting for President 1856 and Wealth 1860: Cincinnati,” in William E. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party; Gienapp, “Who Voted for Lincoln?” in John L. Thomas, ed. Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition (Amherst, 1986), 50–96. See also Dale Baum and Dale T. Knoble, “Anatomy of a Political Realignment: New York Presidential Politics, 1848–1860,” in New York History Vol. 65, No. 1 (January, 1984): 60–81. 60 Lause, Free Labor, 22–26. As Lause points out, gatherings in the border South cities tended to express their approval of various “compromise” measures, including the Crittenden Compromise, which would have given slavery permanent sanction in the states where it already existed.

332 Lincoln within months of one another in 1862. Doubtless, many western farmers and workingmen welcomed the advent of a transcontinental railroad, which spurred development and provided the West with access to vast new markets. But to the National Reformers and other labor reformers who prioritized the establishment of a right to the soil and a safety-net of individual homesteads over the spread of market relationships, the Republicans’ railroad schemes were an ominous sign of what was to come. Just how ominous had been apparent at least since the spring of 1848, when dry-goods merchant and entrepreneur Asa Whitney attempted to hold a meeting “of the Bankers and Capitalists” to discuss his plan to fund the transcontinental railroad through land sales at the Broadway Tabernacle. Land reformers stormed the meeting and effected a hostile takeover, electing Lewis Ryckman to the chair. The reformers then passed resolutions denouncing Whitney’s plan as “betraying a trust” by “endowing Railroad

Companies, or Syndicates with the inheritance of the people,” as Whitney and his fellow entrepreneurs “left by the rear entrance.”61

The incident highlights important distinctions between the radical labor reform and

Republican interpretations of “free soil” and “free labor,” foreshadowing future fissures between the postwar labor movement and the pro-business Republican establishment. Despite the temporary setback dealt by the land reformers in 1848, Whitney’s vision of a transcontinental railroad fired the imaginations of average citizens as well as entrepreneurs and politicians, including Stephen Douglas, whose Kansas-Nebraska Act was motivated partly by his desire to facilitate the construction of a Pacific railroad along a northwesterly route, a project Doulgas believed could only be accomplished by resolving the sectional controversy by making concessions to the slaveholding expansionists. Both Republican and Democratic platforms in

61 Mark A. Lause recounts this episode in Young America, 91, having adapted it from Ingalls, Reminiscences, 27–28. For the National Reformers’ hostility to railroads and corporations, see the Working Man’s Advocate, April 13, 1844 and March 1, 1845; Young America, December 6, June 28, 1845; Devyr, Odd Book, 4, 33, 142, 157 and passim.

333 1860 (including that of southern Democratic candidate John Bell) urged subsidizing the construction of a Pacific railroad, but it was a Republican Administration and Congress that would eventually oversee the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869—a feat made possible by the 1862 Act’s issuance of government bonds and land grants and the power (and capital) of corporations like the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies, both of which exploited loopholes in the Homestead Act to accumulate yet more land.62

Doubtless many Republicans had been sincere in their desire to reserve the public lands of the West for “free labor.” But the party’s Whiggish preference for utilizing the power of government to spur national development, combined with the laissez-faire assumptions embedded in its economic policies and its associations in the popular mind with nativism, abolitionism, and a growing class of industrial capitalist elites, likely alienated many urban workers. Ultimately, these same ideologies made their way into a fatally-compromised

Homestead Act and probably helped to guarantee that the ideals represented by the Pacific

Railroad Act would triumph over those represented by the Homestead in the postwar period.

Regardless, the Republican vision of free labor would do much to set the terms of the debate over the role of land and labor in the nation’s political economy for decades to come.

The Republican Appeal to Labor: Free Labor

The Republican ideology of free labor has been analyzed and dissected by numerous scholars since the publication of Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men in 1970.63 As

62 Both the Douglas and Breckenridge Democrats supported Pacific railroad construction in 1860. Yonatan Etal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 70. On the limitations and paradoxes of Republican free labor in the postwar period, see William Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. 4 (1985): 787–809. 63 The literature on free labor is vast, but see in particular the revised introduction to Foner, Free Soil, as well as Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Forbath, “Ambiguities of Free Labor”; Jonathan A. Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991); Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention

334 these studies have made clear, “free labor” was hardly invented from whole cloth by

Republicans; rather, Republican free labor was constructed from a range of ideas, arguments, and rhetorical traditions, including several first developed and articulated by labor reformers. Nor were Republican understandings of free labor monolithic; although they were broadly in agreement about the superiority of northern non-slave labor and reiterated a few key points in particular when appealing to ordinary northerners and defending the economic way of life in the

North, Republicans definitions of “free labor” were at least as varied, and sometimes as paradoxical, as the criticisms and alternatives levied by free labor’s critics.

As we have seen, Republicans made the appeal to ordinary workers a central part of their electoral strategy, and labor remained central to Republican thinking about social issues and political economy. Republicans frequently emphasized the modest occupational backgrounds of their candidates and their experience as manual laborers. The most famous exemplar of this was, of course, Lincoln himself, whose humble origins as a common laborer on the Illinois frontier were emphasized throughout the 1860 campaign via nicknames such as “the Rail Splitter” (not coincidentally the name of a short-lived Republican newspaper that emphasized homestead and other issues thought to appeal to laboring men). Lincoln’s running mate in 1860, Hannibal

Hamlin of Maine, had worked as a farm laborer, while former shoemaker Henry Wilson of

Massachusetts, known as “the Natick cobbler,” had once been an indentured servant.64

Most Republican arguments about the relationship between labor and capital were predicated on a liberal individualist understanding of free labor which defined it as the freedom of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350 – 1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Era of Slave Emancipation (Chicago and New York: University of Chicago, 1998). 64 On Lincoln as the “Rail-splitter,” see Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 943–44, n42; Mark Plummer, “Lincoln and the Rail-Splitter Election,” Lincoln Herald, 101 (1999): 111–16. The image seems to have crystallized shortly before the 1860 Chicago convention, when Lincoln’s friend John Hanks appeared with two rail planks he claimed he had made with Lincoln in 1830.

335 to compete in a market for wages governed by the law of supply and demand, given the essential preconditions of equality under the law and the basic right of self-ownership.65 But at times,

Republicans articulated theories of free labor that were strikingly similar to those which had been advanced by labor reformers since the days of Jefferson. In describing labor as “the source of all our wealth, of all our progress, of all of our dignity and value,” New York Republican William

Evarts was unconsciously reiterating the labor theory of value. Others, like Israel Washburn, updated the Locofoco attack on special privilege and built on the foundations created by Thomas

Morris and Charles Sumner by rhetorically connecting the “Money Power” to the “Slave Power.”

Lincoln echoed the language of labor reformers when he proclaimed that capital was “the fruit of labor,” and even seemed to suggest that laborers had a right to take “the whole product” of labor for themselves. And Frederick Douglass, despite his consistent denunciation of the “wage slavery” thesis, agreed that competition with slave labor made the “white man almost as much a slave as the slave himself... the white man is robbed by the slave system, of just results of his labor, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.”

Lincoln, Wilson, Wendell Phillips, and others also argued strongly in favor of universal education for ordinary workers, recalling the demands of William Heighton and other labor reformers of the 1820s and 30s and repudiating the long-held association between manual labor and “degradation.”66

65 Glickstein cites William E. Channing’s Slavery (1835) as an early example of this. 66 Evarts and Washburn quoted in Foner, Free Soil, 12, 22; Bernard Mandel, Labor, Free and Slave (New York: Associated Authors, 1955), 156–7; Abraham Lincoln, “An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859” (originally published in the Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 October 1859 and Chicago Press and Tribune, 1 October 1859); Douglass quoted in Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 8; Wendell Phillips, Remarks of Wendell Phillips, at the Mass Meeting of Workingmen, at Faneuil Hall, Nov. 2, 1865 (Boston: Voice Printing and Publishing Co., 1865). As Mandel points out, Lincoln’s socialistic-sounding comment about “the whole product of labor” was made in the context of an argument for protective tariffs made early in his career, and likely referred to manufacturers as the “laborers” for whom the full value of their productions was to be secured by government. See Lincoln’s "Annual Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,” analyzed in detail below. For Douglass on “wage slavery,” see the North Star, April 7, 1848.

336 Ironically, it was southern slaveholders and their apologists who re-introduced the concept of “wage slavery” to the national conversation in the 1850s, and who arguably did the most in the decade to underscore the contrast between a southern social system based on slavery and a northern one based on free labor.67 Among the most notorious statements of the period was that of South Carolina Senator (previously Governor and Congressman) James Henry Hammond, who, in the same March 8, 1858 speech that helped to popularize the phrase “King Cotton,” proclaimed his view of the proper relationship between labor and capital in the following way:

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life; a class requiring but a low order of intellect and little skill. This class constitutes the mudsills of society, and of political government. The manual, hired laborers of the North, the operatives, as they are called, are mere slaves.”68

Other southern politicians and spokesmen repudiated the Declaration of Independence, denounced the very idea of free society as spurious, and hinted that slavery was the proper condition for all laborers, regardless of race.69 Historians have often noted the similarity between the critiques of the northern “wages system” made by southern slaveholders like Hammond and

George Fitzhugh and those made by northern reformers like George Henry Evans and Orestes

Brownson. But they have rarely paid sufficient attention to the timing or context in which such statements were made. Hammond’s remarks, quoted above, were made in response to a speech by William H. Seward trumpeting the “triumph of free labor,” and most southern critiques of

67 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class 81, 84; Eric Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Ante-Bellum America,” in Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War, 57–76. As Foner points out and Roediger reiterates, the language of wage slavery was largely “eclipsed” during the war, only to “rise like a Phoenix” in the postwar labor movement. Foner, Politics and Ideology, 76. 68 James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Co., 1866), 318. 69 See especially George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1854), and Cannibals All!, or Slaves without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris, 1857); Hammond, “Speech on the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858,” in Letters and Speeches, 301–22; William John Grayson, The Hireling and Slave, Chicora, and Other Poems (Charleston, SC: McCarter Co., 1856).

337 northern wage labor did not emerge until the mid-1850s, after the eruption of the sectional crisis and more than a decade after “wage slavery” arguments had been popularized by northern labor agitators. Proslavery intellectuals like Fitzhugh were avid readers of abolitionist and labor reform newspapers—Fitzhugh apparently read the Liberator, the National Era, and a land reform paper published by Gerrit Smith, among others—and were well-versed in contemporary arguments about political economy and European social developments, which they read and quoted from selectively to demonstrate that free society was a misguided delusion. Fitzhugh specifically repudiated the notion of a natural right to land and denounced the Homestead bill, which he equated with an attack on property rights in his Sociology for the South (1854). Three years later, in his Cannibals All!, he repeatedly identified “agrarianism” as the ideology that bound together figures like Greeley, Garrison, Gerrit Smith, William H. Seward, and Gamaliel Bailey. As they had during congressional debates over Homestead, southern politicians and proslavery ideologues frequently cited land reform as a particularly insidious expression of the

“agrarianism” that they believed lurked behind a sinister conspiracy amongst abolitionists and labor agitators. Speakers at the Virginia secession convention in 1861 identified “exemption and homestead laws, and the cry of land for the landless” as among the ills that plagued northern society, and a correspondent of Andrew Johnson’s from Alabama condemned Homestead as a plan to “abolitionize” the West by encouraging the non-slaveowning followers of Hinton Helper to migrate there.70

Republicans, perceiving an opportunity to defend the northern way of life and score points with the ordinary workingmen whose votes they courted, pounced on such statements,

70 George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 185, 192–93; Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 141–42, 308–310, 330–31, 327; Liberator, October 7, 1864; speech of Anderson of Mississippi, Virginia Secession Convention, Fifth Day of Convention, February 18, 1861 [other ref quoted by Liberator?]; Johnson Papers, loose letter, dated Feb 20 1860, cited in Zahler, Eastern Workingmen, 188.

338 sensing—correctly—that if many northern workers agreed with southern critics’ diagnosis of the problems inherent in free labor society, they were appalled by the “cure” they proscribed—a kind of “Slavery National” that threatened ultimately to enslave all who labored for a living.

Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson was among the first to take up the gauntlet. In 1858, during congressional debate over the proslavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas, Wilson offered a point-by-point rebuttal of the “mudsill” argument. Hurling the words of Hammond, Calhoun, and other southern statesmen back in their faces, Wilson seized on their use of the term “hireling labor” to underscore the rhetorical contrast between free and slave labor. To emphasize the inherent dignity that Republicans believed resided in free labor relationships, Wilson pointed to his own experience as both employee and employer to stress the “equality” and “manhood” inherent in both positions (somewhat less plausibly, he also claimed that “an immense majority” of northern wage workers owned property). Perhaps most persuasively, he cited reams of statistics to demonstrate the North’s superior productivity and economic equality and to refute what southerners believed to be their ace card, the idea that the North was dependent on “King

Cotton.” Only about one-seventeenth of northern manufacturing, Wilson pointed out, relied on the supply of raw cotton; even in Massachusetts, the largest cotton manufacturer and Wilson’s home state, only a value of some $26,000,000 out of Massachusetts’ estimated $350,000,000 of manufactures—one-thirteenth of the total—had been in cotton. Quoting Hammond’s depiction of the North as “our factors” and his threat that the South might “discharge” the North once its services were no longer necessary, Wilson imagined a parallel scenario playing out on

Hammond’s plantation: “’Massa, you only sells de cotton! ‘Spose we discharge you...’” Northern

“mud-sills,” Wilson intimated, had already reached the same conclusion as Hammond’s slaves.71

71 Henry Wilson, “Speech of Henry Wilson on Lecompton Constitution,” Congressional Globe, 35th Cong, 1st Sess, Appendix, May 20, 1858, 167–174.

339 As Wilson’s example suggests, Republicans didn’t so much invent free labor ideology as add various innovations and refinements in response to changing circumstances. Confronted with the assertive expansionism and apparent profitability of the Cotton South, Republicans built on the foundation of older free labor arguments, first articulated by Adam Smith and elaborated by successive generations of abolitionists and labor reformers, about the inferiority of enslaved labor. In an address delivered in Washington, D.C. in 1856, the Maine Republican and former

Democrat George M. Weston revisited Adam Smith’s arguments about slavery’s inefficiency, but added a new twist: that “southern slavery reduces northern wages.” Far from being doomed to die a natural death, slavery’s very “inferiority” posed a clear and present danger to the interests of northern workers. As long as slavery had been relegated to southern climes and restricted to producing staples, northern laborers had indirectly benefitted from slavery, sharing in “the profits of a sin, without sharing either its guilt, or its dangers.” But, Weston warned,

Kansas-Nebraska’s repeal of the “Missouri restriction” and mounting evidence that slaves could be used in factory work meant that slave owner and free laborers were now “direct competitors with each other.” Conceding the old free labor arguments that the incentive of wages was “a better stimulus to industry than the lash” and that free labor was ultimately cheaper than slave labor, Weston argued that, once thrust into direct competition, slavery’s “system of reducing the laborer to a bare subsistence” would force down the wages paid to free labor, thus resulting in a degraded “free labor” that essentially resembled slavery—the very manifestation of the “wage slavery” that proponents of that phrase had feared for decades. Slavery would win out, Weston explained, “not merely by its own strength, but by weakening and deteriorating free labor.” Just as it had heretofore determined the condition of the “non-property holding whites of the South,”

340 the “true cost” of slavery may be that it would “hereafter regulate the wages of the workingmen of the North and West.”72

As one of the clearest distillations of the Republican free labor argument, Lincoln’s 1859

“Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society” has often been scrutinized for its free- labor content.73 But scholars have sometimes failed to take account of the context in which

Lincoln’s famous comparison between “free labor” and what he purposefully termed “the mud- sill theory” was delivered. Most obviously, although the address was delivered in Milwaukee—a growing Midwestern commercial center and hotbed of land limitation and pro-land reform sentiment—his audience was a largely rural and agricultural one. Lincoln devoted more than half of the Milwaukee address to singing the praises of agricultural life and hailing the advances in technology and productivity that were then revolutionizing agriculture in the free states.74 Not only was “free labor,” in Lincoln’s mind, predominantly agricultural, but his introduction of the topic was prefaced by an attempt to frame the dispute over competing visions of free labor as an

72 Southern Slavery Reduces Northern Wages: An Address, by George M. Weston of Maine, delivered in Washington, D.C., March 25, 1856 (Washington, D.C.: 1856), 2–5. Jonathan Glickstein has argued that Weston and similar thinkers were articulating a version of “Gresham’s law,” in which nominally cheaper or inferior products eventually crowd out superior ones. See Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, 143–62. 73 Steven B. Smith has argued, somewhat dismissively, that Lincoln’s Wisconsin Address has “generally been treated by half-Marxists as the urtext of Lincoln’s republican ‘free labor ideology,’” a view which Smith claims is “reductionist.” However, Smith’s claim that Lincoln’s free labor views were inseparable from his larger ethical and moral philosophy, which Smith describes as Kantian, detracts little from the idea that Lincoln had a well-formed vision of political economy in which both moral and pragmatic considerations of the role of labor played a prominent role. See Steven B. Smith, “Lincoln’s Kantian Republic,” in Buccola, ed., Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy, 216-238. For differing views on Lincoln’s understanding of free labor and political economy, see Oliver Fraysee, Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809–1860 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Gabor Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 74 Surely an important factor among the latter (although not one acknowledged by Lincoln, who prefaced his discussion of free labor with an extended rumination on the invention of the steam plow) was the growing number of non-landowning farm hands and seasonal laborers who worked for wages. See also Graham Alexander Peck, “Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of an Antislavery Nationalism,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer 2007): 1–27.

341 argument over “the best way of applying and controlling the labor element,” a formulation seemingly designed to appeal to employers rather than to laborers themselves.75

Lincoln’s free labor argument in his “Address” was premised on the rejection of the idea—long the bane and the jeremiad of labor reformers—that “hired laborers” were “fatally fixed in that condition for life.” It was this assumption, predicated on the prior contention that manual labor always had to be “induced” by the owners of capital, that had led to the erroneous conclusion reached by proponents of the “wage slavery” thesis—that the free hired laborer’s condition was “as bad as, or worse, than that of a slave.” Notably, however, although Lincoln’s characterization might have applied equally to the arguments of both northern labor reformers and southern slavery apologists, Lincoln associated it solely with the latter. By creating an association between this view of northern society and the likes of James Henry Hammond’s

“mud-sill” epithet in the minds of his listeners, Lincoln cleverly helped to defuse whatever credibility remained in the “wage slavery” thesis.

On a theoretical level, Lincoln agreed with labor reformers that “capital is the fruit of labor”; since labor was “prior to, and independent of, capital,” the latter “could never have existed without labor.” But for Lincoln, the “error” lay in assuming that “the whole labor of the world exists within that relation” of dependent laborers and the owners of capital who employed them. As proof, Lincoln pointed to the existence of a “mixed” class (farmers, artisans, and manufacturers who both labored themselves and hired others), and further claimed that “a large majority” in both the North and South who “neither work for others, nor have others working for

75 Abraham Lincoln, “An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859” (originally published in the Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 October 1859 and Chicago Press and Tribune, 1 October 1859).

342 them”; elsewhere, he estimated that perhaps only one-eighth of the northern population worked for wages.

On this latter point, as Eric Foner has pointed out, Lincoln was on shaky ground; although firm statistics are difficult to come by, most economic analyses have concluded that between forty and sixty per cent of Americans worked for wages on the eve of the Civil War, a percentage that would surely have been far greater in the free-labor North (and which does not take into consideration the labor of free women and children, who enjoyed no legal ownership of their wages).76 Somewhat harder to gainsay was Lincoln’s second point, that northern free labor society offered unprecedented opportunities for social mobility. In a frequently-cited portion of the address which embodied the crux of the argument at the heart of Republican free labor,

Lincoln recounted an oft-repeated scenario:

the prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor--the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all--gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.77

It was a classic formulation of the American dream of up-by-the-bootstraps mobility, one that doubtless resonated with his audience, many members of which, as Lincoln noted, had

“doubtless” once been hired laborers themselves. Unquestionably, from the colonial period to

Lincoln’s time, the United States had offered unprecedented opportunities for social and economic advancement. It was this very promise of independence and mobility that labor reformers feared was being lost, and that they sought to make manifest through the

76 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 32. Foner cites David Montgomery’s estimate that 60 percent of the American labor force was employed by 1860; see Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 26–30. 77 Ibid.

343 universalization of landed proprietorship and the substitution of cooperation for competition. But not only were Lincoln’s assumptions about mobility based on a view of northern society that was rapidly becoming anachronistic, his conclusions were drawn from an equally vaunted tradition: that of denying that the plight of labor was connected to any inherent flaw in an unregulated market economy, and pointing instead to the deficiencies of character or weaknesses of individual workers. “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer,” Lincoln informed his listeners, “it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.” Even as he reached back for the republican language of “dependence” to explain individual failure, then, Lincoln simultaneously recalled an even older vocabulary of moralistic individualism and looked forward to an era of unbridled laissez-faire Social Darwinism.78

None of this is to say that Lincoln’s version of free labor did not contain radical possibilities. During an 1860 speaking tour of New England, Lincoln gave his tacit approval to the actions of striking shoemakers, seemingly endorsing their right to strike. Disclaiming any direct knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the strike, Lincoln proclaimed that “I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to,” and that he wished to see such a system “prevail everywhere.” A moment later, however, Lincoln seemed to conflate the right to strike with the more basic right to quit, and he framed both in essentially laissez-faire terms, describing as the ideal society that in which each individual engaged in “the race of life” was “free to acquire property as fast as he can.”

78 Ibid. On the ideological roots of this version of “free labor” in evangelical and other traditions that emphasized morality and individualism, including those of the abolitionists, see Glickstein, “Poverty Is Not Slavery,” 195–218.

344 Lincoln’s few later statements on strikes, such as his message to striking machinists at the

Brooklyn Navy Yard, were similarly equivocal.79

Arguably, the most radical aspect of Lincoln’s vision of free labor was that it applied equally to African Americans. In the same New Haven address on the shoemaker’s strike quoted above, Lincoln explained that “I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him!”80 Time and time again, during his 1857 speech on the Dred Scott decision and in the course of his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln insisted that African Americans were entitled to a basic right to compensated labor and to equal participation in the market for that labor. Much like the labor republicans who preceded him, Lincoln linked this right to the guarantees of the Declaration: “In the right to eat the bread... which his own hand earns,” Lincoln insisted, the black worker was “my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”81 Evidence suggests that free African Americans responded positively to the incentive of wages and to the Republican articulation of freedom to compete in the marketplace as the essential precondition of freedom. Despite his encounter with discrimination from ship caulkers at New Bedford shipyards, Frederick Douglass recalled his early experiences with the

79 “Speech at New Haven, Connecticut,” March 6, 1860, in Roy Basler, ed. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. IV (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 24–25. The strike had originated in the shoemaking center of Lynn, Massachusetts, where it was led by Alonzo Draper, who combined labor activism with abolitionism, and led a regiment of “colored volunteers” during the war. On Draper, see Lause, Free Labor, and New England Historical Society, “Alonzo Draper: Abolitionist and Labor Activist,” http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/alonzo-draper-abolitionist-labor-activist/. Although both the 1860 speeches and Lincoln’s later reception of a strike committee from a group of machinists at the Brooklyn Navy Yard were unprecedented in their tacit acceptance of a right to strike, Lincoln declined to give his official approval or offer to use his executive authority in support of the strike. Lincoln granted the Navy Yard committee a personal hearing in which expressed his “sympathies” with the strikers, but regretted that “he could do nothing as President,” expressing his wish that “the best blood would win.” New York Daily Times, December 5, 1863. 80 Ibid. 81 “First Debate: Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858,” in Basler, ed., Collected Works 3, 1–37. Lincoln repeated the phrase almost word-for-word during the Sixth Debate at Quincy, Illinois, and earlier used it (this time substituting a female pronoun) during his speech on the Dred Scott decision. See Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857,” in Basler, ed., Collected Works, 2, 398–410.

345 free labor system of the North in glowing terms in his Narrative, and Henry Highland Garnet depicted the self-ownership of poor laborers in Britain as line of demarcation between oppressed white workers and enslaved “chattels personal.”82

Two months after Lincoln had made his comment about African Americans’ entitlement to the fruits of their labor, he described the right to labor in even starker terms, as “the real issue,” the “eternal struggle” between the principles of “the common right of humanity” and “the divine right of kings.” No matter what form it took, “whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” It was the wage slavery argument, reconstituted and restated as an affirmation of basic equality in the face of a conflict that was universal and perpetual.83

Republican free labor, then, contained elements of both the labor republicanism of the land and labor reformers, previously embodied by the Democratic Party, and the liberal individualism shared by abolitionists and Associationists, previously embodied by Whigs. Both versions of free labor could be radical in their implications: in the hands of land reformers and other labor republicans, it could imply the redistribution, or even abolition, of some kinds of property; or it could mean simply the universalization of property rights and the ownership of property. By contrast, “liberal” free labor, more often expressed by Republicans, could mean simply the bare freedom of self-ownership, the right to compete in an unregulated market for wages governed by laissez-faire. But it could also could mean the universalization of rights, including the extension of the right to the “fruits of labor” to persons of all races and conditions

82 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 98, 112–116; “Garnet’s Plea for the Bondsman,” Christian News, October 17, 1850. 83 “Seventh and Last Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at, Alton Illinois,” October 15, 1858, in Basler, ed., Collected Works 3, 284–325.

346 of servitude. During Reconstruction, it would also come to include the application of political means to guarantee those rights.

In the meantime, as Henry Wilson’s Senate speech suggests, Southern proslavery rhetoric about “mudsills” made for excellent Republican and pro-Union propaganda. In the 1860 election, workingmen carried banners reading “SMALL-FISTED FARMERS, MUDSILLS OF

SOCIETY, GREASY MECHANICS, FOR A. LINCOLN,” and during the war, abolitionists and

Republicans stepped up their efforts to identify the slaveholder rebellion as a war of capital against labor.84 After the firing on Fort Sumter, a Union Army recruiting poster in New York made similar hay out of Hammond’s infamous words. Calling attention to “Greasy Mechanics” in bold, large-point type, the broadside urged “Machinists, Blacksmiths, Carpenters, Masons,

Boiler-Makers, Railroaders, Wagon-Makers, and Mechanics of all kinds” to form an “Engineers’ and Artisans’ regiment.” Enlistees were promised $.40 per day over regular infantry “when on mechanical work,” and the broadside appealed to laborers in terms similar to Lincoln and

Wilson’s refutation of the “mud-sill theory,” framing the Confederate rebellion as an effort by the “Southern Chivalry” to “degrade Honest Labor,” place the “‘NORTHERN MECHANIC’ on the same grade as the ‘SOUTHERN SLAVE,’” and ultimately even “enslave our children.”85

Organized under Col. Edward Serrell at the Exchange Office at Chambers and Chatham Streets in lower Manhattan, the 1st Engineer Regiment was mustered into service in October, 1861.86

84 Mandel, Labor, Free and Slave, 162. See, for example, “The War a Rebellion of Capital Against Labor, to Enslave the Laborer,” a compendium of the most egregious southern quotes on labor compiled by the former hat-maker and radical abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright, in the Liberator, October 7, 1864. See also Proofs for Workingmen of the Monarchic and Aristocratic Designs of the Southern Conspirators and their Northern Allies (Philadelphia: H.B. Ashmead, 1864); [William Oland Bourne], “A Great Fraud,” “Don’t Unchain the Tiger,” and “A Traitor’s Peace!” [signed “A Democratic Workingman] in William Oland Bourne Papers, Library of Congress; “Constitution of the Democratic Republican Workingmen’s Association of the City of New York,” Iron Platform Extra—No XXXVIII, (January, 1864); Speeches of Hon. William D. Kelley. Replies of the Hon. William D. Kelley to George Northrup, Esq., in the Joint Debate in the Fourth Congressional District (Philadelphia, 1864). 85 “Greasy Mechanics, Attention!,” Collection of Brooklyn Historical Society, Object ID M1975.815. 86 Frederick Phisterer, New York in the War of the Rebellion, 3rd ed. (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1912).

347 On December 14th, Companies A, B, C, D, and E of the Engineers and Artisans

Regiment, comprised of men from New York City, Newark, New Jersey, and smaller towns in

Pennsylvania and along the Hudson River Valley, sailed for James Henry Hammond’s home state of South Carolina. It was to be a long war, during the course of which slavery would be destroyed forever and free labor forever changed.

348

epilogue

The Homestead Act signed by President Lincoln on May 20, 1862 failed to live up even to the more modest hopes of its authors, let alone the millennial expectations long cherished by radical land reformers. In its final form, the Homestead Act provided 160 acres of free land to anyone twenty-one years of age or older, or the head of a family, who was a citizen of the United

States or who had declared an intention to become one. Potential homesteaders had simply to pay a filing fee of $10 and live on and cultivate the land for five years to validate the claim; alternatively, one could pay $1.25 an acre and validate the claim after occupancy of only six months. With southerners out of Congress, the Act passed easily, by a vote of 107 to 16 in the

House and 33 to 7 in the Senate. Within nine months of the law’s passage, over 1,450,000 acres of the public lands had been filed for; by 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications had been processed and more than 270 million acres, or 10 percent of all U.S. lands, had been doled out.1

But almost immediately, those with capital to spare and profit on their minds began the process of exploiting the Homestead Act. To some extent this was the fault of loopholes created by the legislation’s ambiguous language. One ploy, at least according to legend, was to take advantage of the law’s failure to specify whether the “12-by-14 dwelling” that was required by the law to be erected on the property was constructed in feet or inches. More frequently, land speculators simply hired phony claimants to buy up the land, or paid the $1.25 per acre up front, occupy it for six months, and then sell it back at a higher price (in violation of the National

1 Roy Marvin Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, the Public Domain, 1776–1936 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942); Howard Ottoson, Land Use Policy and Problems in the United States (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); Harold Hyman, American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, the 1862 Homestead and Morrill Acts, and the 1944 G.I. Bill (Athens, Ga. and New York: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Hannah L. Anderson, “That Settles It: The Debate and Consequences of the Homestead Act of 1862,” The History Teacher Vol. 45, No. 1 (November, 2011): 117–137; National Archives, “The Homestead Act of 1862,” https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/homestead-act, accessed November 5, 2016.

349 Reformers’ concept of “inalienability,” which would have forbidden such resale). As anticipated by the National Reformers in their showdown with Asa Whitney at the Tabernacle, the new railroad corporations were among the biggest beneficiaries of Homestead fraud. Of the 500 million acres dispersed by the General Land Office between 1862 and 1904, only 80 million acres went to “actual settlers,” with the rest acquired by railroad companies, speculators, cattle ranchers, mining corporations, and the other highly-capitalized interests that sprung up during the Gilded Age. The underfunded and overburdened Land Office lacked the manpower to investigate claims spread amid millions of acres and thousands of local land offices, and its agents were often susceptible to bribes.2

Urban workers often lacked the start-up capital, as well as the agricultural skills, to escape the crowded wage labor market of the eastern cities and take advantage of the Homestead

Act. But the disadvantages faced by northern wage workers and immigrants paled before those faced by some four million newly-emancipated former slaves. Here, too, the land reformers’ warnings that emancipation without a concurrent distribution of land had proven prescient.

Throughout the Reconstruction South, former slaves expected and demanded access to the soil as independent proprietors. As an Alabama freedmen’s convention put it in an a classic expression of the labor theory of value, the property still concentrated in the hands of former slaveholders and Confederates “was nearly all earned by the sweat of our brows.” But most freedmen not only failed to receive the “” that many had believed promised to them by

General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, they ended up remaining on the same land they had worked as slaves—not as proprietors, but as sharecroppers or in other semi-dependent capacities. Headed by Robert Dale Owen and abolitionists James McKaye and

2 Anderson, “That Settles It,” 117–137; National Archives, “The Homestead Act of 1862,” https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/homestead-act, accessed November 5, 2016.

350 Samuel Gridley Howe, the precursor to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the American Freedmen’s

Inquiry Commission, searched for ways to aid the process of the transition from slavery to freedom. Howe traveled to Canada to visit communities formed by former slaves there, while

Owen insisted that, if treated justly and offered “temporary aid and supervision,” former slaves would remain in the South and become good and loyal citizens.3 As it was initially devised by

Republican congressmen, the bill to re-charter the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866 would have allotted 3 million acres of public lands in the South for by African Americans.

During Congressional debate on the bill, Sen. Lyman Trumbull included a provision affirming former slaves’ right to the lands in coastal South Carolina and Georgia set aside for them by

General Sherman, and Thaddeus Stevens added a clause turning the “forfeited estates of the enemy” into potential land for black homesteaders. But even before President Johnson vetoed the

Freedman’s Bureau bill, Stevens’ clause was overwhelmingly defeated by the Republican- dominated House. As Eric Foner has put it, “Republicans were quite willing to offer freedmen the same opportunity to acquire land as whites already enjoyed under the Homestead Act of

1862, but not to interfere with planters’ property rights.” 4

The subsequent Southern Homestead Act, sponsored by George W. Julian and intended to provide African Americans and loyal whites with access to public lands in the South, was arguably an even bigger failure than the original. Slaveholding plantations had long since monopolized the best lands, leaving swampy, barren, or mountainous soil; only 4,000 black families applied for land under the Act’s provisions, and much of the land ended up in the hands of white-owned timber companies. Although black landed proprietorship existed in the

3 Samuel Gridley Howe, The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West. Report to the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1864); Robert Dale Owen, The Wrong of Slavery, the Right of Emancipation, and the Future of the African Race in the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1864). 4 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 68–71, 105, 245–46.

351 Reconstruction South, with success stories in Florida and South Carolina, where perhaps 10 percent of black families acquired land by the end of Reconstruction, land ownership remained the exception.5 In 1869, Douglass proposed the formation of a “national land and loan company” to enable freedmen to purchase land on easy credit terms, and in a few places, such as Colleton

County, South Carolina, and David Bend, Mississippi—the plantation formerly owned by

Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s Joseph Emory Davis, and managed by Davis’s formerly enslaved foreman Benjamin T. Montgomery as a cooperative community into the 1880s, blacks utilized cooperative labor schemes with some success.6 But such stories remained the exception, with perhaps only one in twenty black families in the cotton states acquiring land by 1876, and by the late 1870s, African American “Exodusters” and other migrants were seeking refuge in

Kansas and elsewhere in the North and West.7

Meanwhile, urban workingmen awaited what the Boston Labor Reform Association called the reconstruction of the “whole Social System.” At the same time, in a perhaps unintended emphasis on what would come to be referred to as “bread and butter” labor unionism, the same Boston workingmen implied that, like the nation itself, “so must our dinner tables be reconstructed.” As they had before the war, labor organizations would cooperate with

Republicans on legislative solutions to the problems faced by laborers and espoused cooperative approaches and “worker’s control” to the increasing division of labor and mechanization imposed by industrialization.8 But labor reformers faced a different world than the one they had

5 Ibid., 404. 6 Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress (Speech, Article, and Book File; Micellany, Folder 7); Janet Sharp Hermann, “Reconstruction in Microcosm: Three Men and a Gin,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Autumn, 1980): 312–335; Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (Oxford, Miss. and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1999). 7 Foner, Reconstruction, 404. Foner cites the 1876 Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 137, for this statistic. 8 Quoted in David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972), ix; see also Montgomery, Worker’s Control in America, and Alex Gourevitch, From

352 confronted before 1860. Within a decade of the close of the war, both the free labor vision espoused by Lincoln and the agrarian version championed by labor reformers had receded irretrievably into the past. Between 1865 and 1873, industrial production increased 75 percent from the end of the war, more miles of railroad track were laid than had existed in entire country before the war, and by the latter year, the number of nonagricultural laborers exceeded that of farmers for the first time in the country’s history. In the decade that followed, a series of panics and depressions, the demise of the Radicals and emergence of the Liberal Republicans, and the increasingly vicious suppression of strikes and other worker’s activities would drive many workingmen into the arms of the Knights of Labor, the Greenback-Labor, and finally the

Socialist-Labor Party, just as rising land prices, issues of money supply and inflation, and advent of large-scale mechanized agriculture and the crop-lien system, and the intervention of banks, middlemen, and brokers would propel southern and western farmers to the

Grangers, Farmers Alliance, Greenback, and People’s Parties. In 1880, the Greenback-Labor platform, the product of a short-lived political alliance between southern and western farmers and urban workingmen, declared that “land, air, and water are the grand gifts of nature to all mankind, and the law or custom of society that allows any person to monopolize more of these gifts of nature than he has a right to, we earnestly condemn and demand shall be abolished.”9

Out in California, a young journalist, , noted in 1871 that the state head already become “not a country of farms,” but of large “plantations and estates,” often worked by

Chinese indentured servants and migrant Mexican workers. In his ,

Slavery to Cooperative Commonwealth; Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 9 Foner, Reconstruction, 461; Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 4-13; Fink, Knights of Labor; Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth Century South (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Jackson T. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 133–66; Greenback-Labor platform quoted in Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 136.

353 published eight years later, George proceeded from the same propositions that had actuated

National Reformers almost forty years earlier: that land, like other natural resources, was the common inheritance of all and could not be legitimately the property of any individual or corporation, but rather belonged to the public trust. George’s “single-tax” plan, which called for a tax on land, but not on the improvements or revenue produced from it, became the basis of his quixotic (but nearly successful) run for Mayor of New York City in 1886 as well as of a strain of populist economic thought that motivated farmers, workingmen, and others throughout the period.10

Such ideals also continued to inspire former abolitionists and their ideological (and literal) descendants. In 1898, a compendium of George’s works was published that included an overview of Gerrit Smith’s thoughts and writings on land monopoly; the introduction, written by

William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., imagined Smith as “a Forerunner of Henry George.” Other former abolitionists, perhaps none more prominent than Wendell Phillips, also emerged as strong advocates of the right to labor in the post-Civil War period. Whether or not Phillips had uttered the words attributed to him in the 1840s, that “the great question of Labor, when it shall fully come up, will be found paramount to all others,” his postwar activities largely bore out that conclusion. Veterans of the workingmen’s struggles of the 1820s through 50s also reemerged to champion their vision for the post-Emancipation United States. Ex-National Reformer William

V. Barr and former New England Workingmen’s Association leader John Orvis both ran for office on joint Socialist Labor Party-Greenback-Populist tickets, and Union Army General James

10 Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1886).

354 B. Weaver, who had been involved with land reform in Iowa and commanded Second Iowa troops at Shiloh and elsewhere, ran for president on the Greenback-Labor and Populist tickets. 11

Before the end of the war, in February, 1865, the elderly former leader of the

Philadelphia Working Men, William Heighton, surfaced after decades of obscurity to pen a letter to George L. Stearns, an abolitionist Radical Republican and supporter of John Brown.

Heighton’s letter was published in a pamphlet on The Equality of All Men before the Law,

Claimed and Defended, with contributions from Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Elizur

Wright, and Pennsylvania ironmonger and Republican William D. Kelley. Stearns had solicited

Heighton’s aid in helping, among other things, “to organize the anti-slavery men of the country,” and to consider “the reconstruction of the social and political institutions of the Rebel States,” including the “remodel[ing of] our financial system, in order to correct abuses growing out of slavery.” Heighton, writing from the seclusion of rural New Jersey, professed ignorance of any knowledge about the latter, but pledged to offer his assistance to “reconstruct the Rebel States, and re-unite them upon the basis of liberty and equal rights.” Heighton’s recommendations for

Reconstruction emphasized “the Unity and Essential Equality of the Human Race,” which included the “Equality of Rights,” not only to “life and liberty,” but the “right to property in the common elements of nature,—light, air, water, and the land.”

Heighton’s other points stressed the “Responsibility of Government” to secure these rights, attacked monopolies, and upheld the sanctity of the elective franchise. But Heighton felt that his proposition about the right to property was “so important” that he spent much of the rest of his letter elaborating on it. “Immense landed estates,” Heighton intoned, “are death to

11 William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., introduction, Gerrit Smith on Land Monopoly [Sketch of Smith], with Introduction by Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the Younger (Chicago: Public Publishing Co., 1898); Lause, Young America, 136. For an early example of Wendell Phillips’ postwar labor activism, see Remarks of Wendell Phillips, at the Mass Meeting of Workingmen in Faneuil Hall, Nov. 2, 1865 (Boston: Voice Publishing and Printing Co, 1865).

355 Democracy”; “even under republican forms,” they were capable of subverting the democratic process and becoming “an element of jarring and perpetual discord.” “The landed estates, therefore, of all the prominent and active rebels... should be confiscated and broken up.” After the leading Confederates had been duly punished, their heirs who pledged an oath of allegiance might be given “so much land as would constitute a moderate homestead,” but “an equal homestead should be apportioned to each colored family.” “These,” Heighton concluded, “have the first and highest right, since the cleaning and improvements have been done mainly by their labor.”12

Like so much of what the pre-Civil War labor reformers had stood for, Heighton’s final contribution to the public record serves more a reminder of what might have been than a prediction of what came to pass. But by showing the way towards the alternate routes that fed into the main path of history, Heighton and others like him may have helped to alter its course at a critical fork in the road and point the way for future generations of radicals and reformers.

12 “Reconstruction: A Letter from William Heighton to George L. Stearns,” in The Equality of All Men before the Law, Claimed and Defended; in Speeches by Hon. William D. Kelley, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, and Letters from Elizur Wright and Wm. Heighton (Boston: Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1865), 42–43. Heighton’s letter was cited in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 793–94, to whose work this dissertation is indebted. However, I emphasize a different aspect of Heighton’s letter here.

356 BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

Newspapers and Periodicals

Albany Argus Albany Patriot American Freeman American Universal Magazine Annals of Congress Anti-Renter Anti-Slavery Bugle The Awl Baltimore Sun Boston Daily Chronotype Boston Investigator Boston Laborer Boston Quarterly Review Brooklyn Daily Eagle Christian News Cincinnati Daily Nonpareil Cincinnati Emporium, Cincinnati Literary Gazette Commercial Advertiser Cooperative Magazine Daily Wisconsin Fall River Mechanic Frederick Douglass’ Paper Free Enquirer Freedom’s Journal The Genius of Universal Emancipation The Harbinger Iron Platform Liberator Liberty Bell Liberty Hall and Cincinnati Gazette The Man Manchester Operative Mechanics’ Free Press National Anti-Slavery Standard National Era National Laborer New England Operative New-Harmony Gazette

357 New Harmony and Nashoba Gazette New York Evening Post New-York Daily Times New-York Daily Tribune New York Herald New York Morning Courier and New York Enquirer New-York Sentinel and Working Man’s Advocate Niles’ National Register North Star Northampton Democrat The Olive Branch Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser Pennsylvania Packet or General Advertiser The People’s Rights The Phalanx Philadelphia Aurora and General Adverstiser Philadelphia Times and Keystone Philanthropist The Radical The Rail Splitter The Subterreanean The Subterranean, United with the Working Man’s Advocate The Temple of Reason Voice of Industry Vox Populi Waukesha Democrat Wisconsin Argus Wisconsin Free Democrat Wisconsin Freeman Working Man’s Advocate

Manuscript Collections

Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Boston Union of Associationists Records, Harvard University Houghton Library Boston Religious Union of Associationists Records, Harvard University Houghton Library Brotherhood of the Union Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society Bryant-Godwin Papers, New York Public Library William Oland Bourne Papers, Library of Congress Buxton National Historic Site and Museum (various manuscript materials) William H. Channing Collection, Harvard University Houghton Library Chatham-Kent Historical Society (various manuscript materials) Horace Greeley Papers, Library of Congress Greeley-Colfax Papers, NYPL

358 James T. Fisher Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Benjamin Lundy Papers, Ohio History Connection Macdonald Collection on American Utopian Communities, Yale University Beinecke Library Samuel May Collection, Cornell University Kroch Library Records of the 28th–35th Congress, National Archives. Records of the District Courts of the United States, 1685–2009, National Archives Religious Union of Associationists Records, Massachusetts Historical Society George Ripley Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University Mike Walsh Papers, New-York Historical Society Weston Collection, Boston Public Library Hiram Wilson Papers, Oberlin University Theresa Wolfson Papers, Cornell University Kroch Library

Pamphlets, Broadsides, and Ephemera

The Jubilee, A Plan for Restoring the Land of New-York or (Incidentally) of Any Other State to the People. New York: Young America, n.d.

Lundy, Benjamin. A Circular, Addressed to Agriculturalists, Manufacturers, Mechanics, &c., on the Subject of Mexican Colonization. Philadelphia: J. Richards, 1835.

[Lundy, Benjamin ed.]. The Anti-Texass Legion. Protest of Some Free Men, States, and Presses against the Texass Rebellion, Against the Laws of Nature and of Nations. Albany, 1844.

Greasy Mechanics, Attention! Broadside. New York: n.d. [1861].

National Reform Almanac for 1848. New York: Office of Young America, 1848.

Proofs for Workingmen of the Monarchic and Aristocratic Designs of the Southern Conspirators and their Northern Allies. Philadelphia: H.B. Ashmead, 1864.

Rease, W.M. The Union Must, and Shall Be Preserved. Broadside. Philadelphia, 1860.

[Smith, Gerrit]. Gerrit Smith’s Constitutional Argument. Jackson & Chaplin, 1844.

Stewart, Alvan. Tract No. 4. The Cause of the Hard Times. Boston 1843.

To the Mechanics and Working-Men of the Fifth Ward, And those friendly to their Interests. New York: n.d.

359 Wright, Theodore S., Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith. An Address to the Three Thousand Colored Citizens of New-York, Who Are the Owners of One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Acres of Land... New York, 1846.

Published Speeches and Addresses

The Equality of All Men before the Law, Claimed and Defended; in Speeches by Hon. William D. Kelley, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass, and Letters from Elizur Wright and Wm. Heighton. Boston: Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1865.

Chase, Salmon P. Speech of Senator Chase, Delivered at Toledo, May 31st, 1851, Before a Mass Convention of the Democracy of North-Western Ohio (1851).

Chase, Salmon P., Charles Sumner, J.R. Giddings, Edward Wade, Gerrit Smith, and Alexander De Witt. Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the People of the United States: Shall Slavery Be Permitted in Nebraska? Towers’ Printers, 1854.

Durkee, Charles. The Fugitive Slave Law, Etc. Speech of Charles Durkee, of Wisconsin, in the House of Representatives, August 6, 1852, on the Fugitive Slave Law as a ‘Finality’ and the Present Position of Parties, (Washington, D.C., 1852).

Dwight, John S. Lecture on Association, In Its Connection with Education, Delivered Before the New England Fourier Society, February 29th, 1844. Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1844.

Godwin, Parke, and American Union of Associationists. Phalansterian Association: An Address to the People of the United States by the American Union of Associationists. [1850?]. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Goodell, William. Address of the Macedon Convention by William Goodell; and Letters of Gerrit Smith. Albany: S. W. Green, 1847.

Grow, Galusha. Nebraska and Kansas: Speech of Hon. G.A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, in the House of Representatives, May 10, 1854. Washington, D.C.: 1854.

“A Fellow Laborer” [Heighton, William ]. Address to the Members of Trade Societies, and to the Working Classes Generally... Philadelphia, 1827.

Hine, L. A. [Lucius Alonzo]. A Lecture on Garrisonian Politics Before the Western Philosophical Institute, Delivered in Cincinnati, Sunday, April 24th, 1853. Cincinnati: Longley and Brother, 1853.

[Hosmer, Charles ]. The Condition of Labor: An Address to the Members of the Labor Reform League of New England; in a Speech in Support of Some Resolution

360 Offered at Their Late Convention in Boston, By One of the Members. Boston: Published by the Author, 1847.

Julian, George W. Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, on the Slavery Question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850. Washington: Congressional Globe, 1850.

Kelley, William D. Speeches of Hon. William D. Kelley. Replies of the Hon. William D. Kelley to George Northrup, Esq., in the Joint Debate in the Fourth Congressional District. Philadelphia, 1864.

Leavitt, Joshua. The Financial Power of Slavery: The Substance of an Address Delivered in Ohio, in September, 1840. New York: 1841.

Lincoln, Abraham. An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859. Originally published in the Milwaukee Sentinel, 1 October 1859 and Chicago Press and Tribune, 1 October 1859.

Luther, Seth. An Address on the Origin and Progress of Avarice, and Its Deleterious Effects on Human Happiness. Boston, 1834.

Owen, Robert. Address to the Operative Manufacturers and Agricultural Laborers in Great Britain and Ireland. n.p., 1830.

------. An Address to the Master Manufacturers of Great Britain on the Present Existing Evils in the Manufacturing System. Bolton, 1819.

Phillips, Wendell. Remarks of Wendell Phillips, at the Mass Meeting of Workingmen, at Faneuil Hall, Nov. 2, 1865. Boston: Voice Printing and Publishing Co., 1865.

Smith, Gerrit. Homes for All: Speech of Gerrit Smith, on the Homestead Bill, In Congress, February 21, 1854. Washington, D.C.: Buell and Blanchard, 1854.

------. No Slavery in Nebraska, No Slavery in the Nation, Slavery an Outlaw: Speech of Gerrit Smith, on the Nebraska Bill, in Congress, April 6, 1854. Washington, D.C.: Buell & Blanchard, 1854.

------. Speeches of Gerrit Smith in Congress. New York: Mason Brothers, 1856.

Walker, Isaac Pigeon. The Compromise Resolutions. Speech of Hon. I. P. Walker, of Wisconsin, in Senate of the United States, March 6, 1850, On the Compromise Resolutions submitted by Mr. Clay, on the 25th of January. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1850.

361 Weston, George M. Southern Slavery Reduces Northern Wages: An Address, by George M. Weston of Maine, delivered in Washington, D.C., March 25, 1856. Washington, D.C.: 1856.

Whitcomb, Jr., Samuel. An Address Before the Working-Men’s Society of Dedham, Delivered on the Evening of September 7, 1831. Dedham, Mass: L. Powers, 1831.

Constitutions, Articles of Association, and Convention Proceedings

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Longley, Alexander. Fourier Phalanx Agreement. (Cincinnati, n.d.);

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Report and Constitution, or Plan of Organization of the Democratic Party, in Favor of Equal Rights, and Opposed to All Monopolies by Legislation, As Submitted By the

362 General Convention, and Adopted by the General County Meeting In the City of New-York. New York: Windt and Conrad, 1836.

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Rules of Association of the Brooklyn Brush Manufacturing Company. New York: William S Dorr, 1855.

Government Documents

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Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.

Evans, Frederick. Autobiography of a Shaker (Glasgow, 1888).

Faux, William. Memorable Days in America. London, 1823.

Greeley, Horace. Recollections of a Busy Life, including Reminiscences of American Politics and Politicians... New York: J.B. Ford, 1862.

Greeley, Nathan. A Bibliography of Horace Greeley, Compiled by Nathan Greeley, Editor of the Delta, New Orleans. New York, n.d.

Ingalls, Joshua King. Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform. Elmira, New York: Gazette Company, 1897.

Noyes, George Wallingford, ed., Religious Experience of John Humphrey Noyes, Founder of the Oneida Community. New York: Macmillan Company, 1923.

363 Pears, Thomas, and Sarah Pears. New Harmony: An Adventure in Happiness. New Harmony, IN: Indiana Historical Society, 1933.

Portrait and Biographical Record of Montgomery and Bond Counties, Illinois. Chicago: Chapman Bros., 1892.

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Other Contemporary Publications

An Essay of a Declaration of Rights. Philadelphia, 1776.

The Controversy between New-York Tribune and Gerrit Smith. New York: John A. Gray, 1855.

Ames, Julius Rubens and Benjamin Lundy. The Legion of Liberty!: And Force of Truth, Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds of Some Apostles, Champions and Martyrs. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1842.

Berrian, Hobart. Brief Sketch of the Origin and Rise of the Workingmen’s Party. Washington, D.C., 1840.

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Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. In Four Books. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J.P. Lippencott, 1892.

Branagan, Thomas. The Pleasures of Contemplation 2nd ed. Philadelphia, 1818.

Brisbane, Albert. Social Destiny of Man: or, Association and Reorganization of Industry. Philadelphia: C.F. Stollmeyer, 1840.

------. A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, or Plan for a Re- Organization of Society. New York: J. S. Redfield, 1843.

Byllesby, Langton. Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth. New York, 1826.

Byrdsall, Fitzwilliam. The History of the Loco-Foco, or Equal Rights Party, Its Movements, Conventions and Proceedings, with Short Characteristic Sketches of Its Prominent Men. New York: Clement & Packard, 1842.

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Channing, William E. Slavery. Boston: James Monroe and Company, 1835.

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