A first step was made in the summer of 1836, when the workers in the Navy Yard at Philadelphia struck for a ten-hour day and appealed to President Jackson for relief.  They would have nothing further to do with Congress.  They had supported President Jackson in his fight against the United States Bank and now sought a return favor.  At a town meeting of “citizens, mechanics, and working men,” a committee was appointed to lay the issue before him.  He proved indeed more responsive than Congress and ordered the ten-hour system established.

But the order applied only to the localities where the strike occurred.  The agitation had been chiefly local.  Besides Philadelphia and New York the mechanics secured the ten-hour day in Baltimore and Annapolis, but in the District of Columbia and elsewhere they were still working twelve or fourteen hours.  In other words, the ten-hour day was secured only where trade societies existed.

But the organized labor movement did not rest with a partial success.  The campaign of pressure on the President went on.  Finally, although somewhat belatedly, President Van Buren issued on March 31, 1840, the famous executive order establishing the ten-hour day on government work without a reduction in wages.

The victory came after the National Trades’ Union had gone out of existence and should be, more correctly, correlated with a labor political movement.  Early in 1837 came a financial panic.  The industrial depression wiped out in a short time every form of labor organization from the trade societies to the National Trades’ Union.  Labor stood defenseless against the economic storm.  In this emergency it turned to politics as a measure of despair.

The political dissatisfaction assumed the form of hostility towards banks and corporations in general.  The workingmen held the banks responsible for the existing anarchy in currency, from which they suffered both as consumers and producers.  Moreover, they felt that there was something uncanny and threatening about corporations with their continuous existence and limited liability.  Even while their attention had been engrossed by trade unionism, the workingmen were awake to the issue of monopoly.  Together with their employers they had therefore supported Jackson in his assault upon the largest “monster” of them all—­the Bank of the United States.  The local organizations of the Democratic party, however, did not always remain true to faith.  In such circumstances the workingmen, again acting in conjunction with their masters, frequently extended their support to the “insurgent” anti-monopoly candidates in the Democratic party conventions.  Such a revolt took place in Philadelphia in 1835; and in New York, although Tammany had elected Ely Moore, the President of the General Trades’ Union of New York, to Congress in 1834, a similar revolt occurred.  The upshot was a triumphant return of the rebels into the fold of Tammany in 1837.  During the next twenty years, Tammany came nearer to being a workingmen’s organization than at any other time in its career.