Urban Workers in Philadelphia 1815-1828

Egnal, Freda. The Urban Worker in Philadelphia: 1815-1828. Senior Thesis in American History, 1961. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Freda Egnal

My comrade Freda Egnal from our monthly Philadelphia LeftBook discussion group kindly shared her unpublished Senior Thesis with me, which I enjoyed, and will recount. Her advisor/professor was a young historian Leon F. Litwack, who later won the Pulitzer Prize in History and National Book Award for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery in 1979. His specialty is the history of African-Americans since slavery. Freda did remarkable detective work at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the University of Wisconsin unearthing the early days of organized labor in Philadelphia. Her thesis was written 20 years before Phillip Foner, William Heighton: Pioneer Labor Leader of Jacksonian Philadelphia, With Selections from Heighton's Writings, and Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 addressed the same subject at length. “Philadelphia has a strong claim to be the center of the early labor movement,” she says.

Philadelphia has always been regarded as a center for small manufacturing (now sadly much diminished), and it began during this period. The first American factory is generally considered Lowell's textile mill in Waltham MA in 1817. The period between 1815 and 1830 marked the introduction of machinery and the factory system in Philadelphia. Prior to mills and factories, manufacture was done in homes and small workshops. Sometimes the apprentice even lived in the master's home. Goods were made to order, or bespoke goods. Often half the wages were paid in groceries or credits. Ambitious apprentices would establish their own workshops, or acquire land and become freeholders.

Capitalism was being born. Manufacturers began to produce for market, on speculation. An expanded market was made possible by the revolution in transportation. New roads and canals suddenly made shipping possible and affordable. The state was investing in infrastructure big time. Merchant-capitalists borrowed money, and introduced mass production, creating a division of labor, and the devaluation of artisan labor. Urban workers were a mix of skilled and unskilled: artisans in the building trades and crafts; manual laborers building roads or canals, hauling; service workers, servants, shopkeepers; and, of course, child labor. Freda reports on wages and the cost of living during this period. She cites labor historian John R. Commons, “the American worker received higher wages than his counterpart in Europe and England, yet worked harder and longer hours.” Twelve hours a day, six days a week constituted the norm in 1820. In summer daylight hours often extended the workday to 15 hours.

There were early efforts at labor organizing in Philadelphia. The first recorded strike, or turn-out, was in 1786 by the printers for a minimum six dollars a week wage.  Carpenters and cordwainers (shoemakers) also conducted early organizing. The Philadelphia Typographical Union organized in 1802 may be the first identifiable trade union. They not only fought for better wages and working conditions, but also established benevolent features for sickness and funeral expenses, and a strike fund. It seems printers have always been labor aristocrats. Perhaps they were better educated, or more skilled, and felt they could make bolder demands on business owners. Unions were not legally protected, of course. They are hardly protected today, 200 years hence. Sometimes workers won their demands; other times they were prosecuted under English common law for conspiring to raise their wages.

In 1819 the US experienced it first depression creating widespread unemployment. This put an end to the early trade societies and trade unions. The labor movement had to recreate itself in the 1820s as the economy recovered. Workers at the Navy Yard, millwrights, and machine workers began to agitate for the ten hour day. The growing industrial activity ultimately led to the formation of the first trade union which transcended craft lines, the Mechanics Union of Trade Associations in fall 1827. Many historians mark this as the beginning of the labor movement in the US. Fifteen unions in Philadelphia, learning from their earlier failures, joined together. They declared, “We the Journeymen Mechanics of the City and County of Philadelphia, conscious that our condition in society is lower than justice demands it should be, and feeling our inability, individually, to ward off from ourselves and families those numerous evils which result from an unequal and excessive accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few, are desirous of forming an Association, which shall avert as much as possible those evils which poverty and incessant toil have already inflicted and which threaten ultimately to overwhelm and destroy us.” Sounds very contemporary. The language was influenced by William Heighton and Ricardian socialist ideas, recounted in Phillip Foner's later book William Heighton: Pioneer Labor in Jacksonian Philadelphia. The Mechanics Union published its own newspaper, organized a workingman's library, and ran its own independent candidates for elected office in 1828, which was unsuccessful. This was the high watermark for class consciousness in the early 19th century Philadelphia. Unions would again recede in the 1830s.