Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Chapter 1: Awakenings: The First Cross-Class Labor Reform Organizations, 1832–1848

27 1 AWAKENINGS The First Cross-Class Labor Reform Organizations, 1832–1848 On February 16, 1832, at the Marlborough Hotel on Washington Street in Boston’s central commercial district, “a General Convention of Mechanics and Working Men” met “to concentrate the efforts of the laboring classes, to regulate the hours of labor, by one uniform standard, to promote the cause of education and general information . . . and to maintain their rights, as American Freemen.” From this gathering of more than eighty “delegates,” the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and other Working Men (NEA) emerged.1 At the NEA’s birth, Boston was a port city of more than 60,000 inhabitants, dominated by wharves and warehouses, including the recently completed Faneuil Hall marketplace. In this closely settled community, wealth and poverty constantly intertwined and overlapped. Merchants’ homes stood near the Marlborough Hotel, as well as along nearby Beacon Hill, the Statehouse, and Boston Common. But the Town Dock was also close by, where John Winthrop ’s intrepid band of Puritans had first settled two hundred years earlier, where narrow streets were now clogged daily with wagons, and where the city’s sewer system emptied into stinking tidal mudflats. The city’s economy reflected its commercial character. The port itself employed stevedores, haulers , draymen, and teamsters; while the construction of homes, warehouses, and shops kept carpenters, masons, plumbers, and painters busy. Within the city’s workshops, butchers, bakers, tailors, and seamstresses plied their trades. Meanwhile, a growing cadre of urban professionals—bankers, lawyers, clergymen , and even college professors—also made Boston their home. Several manufacturing sites sprang up south of the central commercial district. Since waterpower was scarce, Bostonians invested in modest-sized industries such 28 Uneasy Allies as glass furnaces, sugar refineries, iron foundries, leather tanneries, and of course shipyards.2 The city’s waterfront teemed not only with goods from across the globe but also with newly arrived migrants and immigrants as well. Young men and women from hard-pressed rural New England families frequently came to the city looking for work. Farmers, craftsmen, and millworkers from England and Scotland—squeezed by the British industrial economy—made up many of the new foreign arrivals. Most shared a common language and Protestant faith with the majority of native-born Bostonians. Yet, some 7,000 Irish Catholics also now called Boston their home, as did hundreds of recent arrivals from France, Germany, and Italy. The occasional seaman (or perhaps deserter) from the Azores, Armenia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Russia, or China added to the polyglot character of the boardinghouses in the city’s North End.3 The NEA convened in a city that was also well known for its vibrant and variegated community of reformers. Drawing on a deep historical taproot of Puritan ideas about communal obligation, as well as more recently coined Unitarian beliefs in rationality and improvement, many Bostonians put a high premium on education and social welfare. The city’s elite often contributed to voluntary societies promoting poor relief, prison reform, care for the mentally ill, temperance, and sometimes even women’s rights and universal peace. Though many of these reforms and reformers were driven by conservative notions of moral stewardship and noblesse oblige, the myriad organizations also created a climate of conscience and debate that sometimes stimulated more radical concepts of social change and more venturesome activists. Perhaps most provocative of all, Boston was now home to William Lloyd Garrison, the outspoken abolitionist who had recently launched his newspaper The Liberator on Washington Street, blocks from the Marlborough Hotel.4 The NEA was indeed an organization of farmers, mechanics, and other workingmen from all over the region, but the association’s leaders also included men who earned their living through “mental labor.” Universalist minister Jacob Frieze served as the organization’s founding secretary; Charles Douglas, a physician, was elected president and editor of its newspaper (New England Artisan). The association addressed issues of immediate import to workers such as the demand for a ten-hour workday, and broader questions such as the morality of child labor and the need for wider access to public education. The NEA was distinct from—though certainly cognizant of—the trade unions and workingmen’s political parties of the early 1830s. Reaching deliberately across occupational categories and class lines to build a coalition Map of Boston, 1842, from H. S. Tanner, The American Traveller, 8th ed. (New York, 1842). Courtesy University...