moral ground that an agitation for a shorter day would open “a wide door for idleness and vice”; hinted broadly at the foreign origin of the agitation; declared that all combinations intending to regulate the value of labor by abridging the working day were in a high degree unjust and injurious to the other classes in the community; announced their resolution to support the masters at the sacrifice of suspending building altogether; and bound themselves not to employ any journeyman or master who might enforce the ten-hour day.  The strike failed.

The renewed trade-union activities brought forth a fresh crop of trials for conspiracy.[3] One case involved Philadelphia master shoemakers who combined to reduce wages, two were against journeymen tailors in Philadelphia and Buffalo and the fourth was a hatters’ case in New York.  The masters were acquitted and the hatters were found guilty of combining to deprive a non-union man of his livelihood.  In the Philadelphia tailors’ case, the journeymen were convicted on the charge of intimidation.  Of the Buffalo tailors’ case it is only known that it ended in the conviction of the journeymen.

(2) Equal Citizenship, 1827-1832

So far we have dealt only with trade societies but not yet with a labor movement.  A labor movement presupposes a feeling of solidarity which goes beyond the boundaries of a single trade and extends to other wage earners.  The American labor movement began in 1827, when the several trades in Philadelphia organized the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations, which was, so far as now known, the first city central organization of trades in the world.  This Union, originally intended as an economic organization, changed to a political one the following year and initiated what was probably the most interesting and most typically American labor movement—­a struggle for “equality of citizenship.”  It was brought to a head by the severe industrial depression of the time.  But the decisive impulse came from the nation-wide democratic upheaval led by Andrew Jackson, for which the poorer classes in the cities displayed no less enthusiasm than the agricultural West.  To the wage earner this outburst of democratic fervor offered an opportunity to try out his recently acquired franchise.  Of the then industrial States, Massachusetts granted suffrage to the workingmen in 1820 and New York in 1822.  In Pennsylvania the constitution of 1790 had extended the right of suffrage to those who paid any kind of a state or county tax, however small.

The wage earners’ Jacksonianism struck a note all its own.  If the farmer and country merchant, who had passed through the abstract stage of political aspiration with the Jeffersonian democratic movement, were now, with Jackson, reaching out for the material advantages which political power might yield, the wage earners, being as yet novices in politics, naturally were more strongly impressed with that aspect of the