The repudiation of active politics did not carry with it a condemnation of legislative action or “lobbying.”  On the contrary, these years witnessed the first sustained legislative campaign that was ever conducted by a labor organization, namely the campaign by the New York Trades’ Union for the suppression of the competition from prison-made goods.  Under the pressure of the New York Union the State Legislature created in 1834 a special commission on prison labor with its president, Ely Moore, as one of the three commissioners.  On this question of prison labor the trade unionists clashed with the humanitarian prison reformers, who regarded productive labor by prisoners as a necessary means of their reform to an honest mode of living; and the humanitarian won.  After several months’ work the commission submitted what was to the Union an entirely unsatisfactory report.  It approved the prison-labor system as a whole and recommended only minor changes.  Ely Moore signed the report, but a public meeting of workingmen condemned it.

The rediscovered solidarity between the several trades now embodied in the city trades’ unions found its first expression on a large scale in a ten-hour movement.

The first concerted demand for the ten-hour day was made by the workingmen of Baltimore in August 1833, and extended over seventeen trades.  But the mechanics’ aspiration for a ten-hour day—­perhaps the strongest spiritual inheritance from the preceding movement for equal citizenship,[5] had to await a change in the general condition of industry to render trade union effort effective before it could turn into a well sustained movement.  That change finally came with the prosperous year of 1835.

The movement was precipitated in Boston.  There, as we saw, the carpenters had been defeated in an effort to establish a ten-hour day in 1825,[6] but made another attempt in the spring of 1835.  This time, however, they did not stand alone but were joined by the masons and stone-cutters.  As before, the principal attack was directed against the “capitalists,” that is, the owners of the buildings and the real estate speculators.  The employer or small contractor was viewed sympathetically.  “We would not be too severe on our employers,” said the strikers’ circular, which was sent out broadcast over the country, “they are slaves to the capitalists, as we are to them.”

The strike was protracted.  The details of it are not known, but we know that it won sympathy throughout the country.  A committee visited in July the different cities on the Atlantic coast to solicit aid for the strikers.  In Philadelphia, when the committee arrived in company with delegates from New York, Newark, and Paterson, the Trades’ Union held a special meeting and resolved to stand by the “Boston House Wrights” who, “in imitation of the noble and decided stand taken by their Revolutionary Fathers, have determined to throw off the shackles of more mercenary tyrants than theirs.”  Many societies voted varying sums of money in aid of the strikers.