The Press of Democracy Fanny Wrightists, democrats and aristocrats, workers and bosses, birth of the penny press.

remained until 1819, when William Cobbett got permission to dig him up and take his remains to a

place where they would be more honored.

Cobbett, a radical English journalist, had fled to New York City in 1817 when the British

government, responding to riots in depressed industrial and agricultural regions, suspended habeas

corpus and drastically curbed the press. Facing incarceration, Cobbett chose exile, and for the next

two years issued his paper from a basement in Wall Street. When he sailed back home, he took

Paine’s bones with him, hoping to get English democrats to build a mausoleum for them. The project

never came to pass, and Paine’s remains eventually went missing. His ideas, however, helped fuel a

renaissance of deism and anticlericalism in 1820s England. Radical urban artisans argued that

religion bolstered authoritarian regimes, crippled freedom of thought, and undermined the

independent rationality essential to citizens of the republican society they longed to create. English

radicals took to celebrating Paine’s birthday each year, and when many of them fled depression and

repression in the late 1820s, they transplanted the custom to New York City. Joining forces with local

freethinkers, they gathered at Harmony Hall on each anniversary and raised their glasses in toasts

such as “Christianity and the Banks, on their last legs.” In 1827 a weekly lecture series on deism was

regularly drawing three hundred people, and George Henry Evans, a journeyman printer of English

parentage, had begun bringing out fresh editions of Paine, Elihu Palmer, and other freethought

advocates.

Radicals hoped thus to inoculate New York’s workers against the tractarians who, they believed,

threatened the separation of church and state, and thus reason and republicanism itself. When

Sabbatarians tried in 1828 to prohibit mail deliveries on Sunday, radicals denounced them as a

would-be Christian party in politics, intent on compelling the citizenry to their standards. Proving

themselves as disciplined as the evangelicals, the freethinkers, aided by a still-widespread

anticlericalism, helped beat back the Sabbatarian offensive. Not surprisingly, when Fanny Wright

arrived, they hailed her as a spectacular champion of their cause.

At first, however, distinguished elites, men like Cadwallader Golden and Philip Hone, also came

to hear Wright speak, in part because for all her radicalism Fanny had impeccable social credentials

and was no stranger to Manhattan’s upper class. Wright’s father was a linen merchant who admired

Tom Paine, and her mother a child of the British aristocracy. Born in Scotland in 1795, she had first

visited New York in 1818, aged twenty-three, with her sister Camilla, to meet liberal thinkers and

political exiles. Back in Europe in 1820, she published her Views of Society and Manners in

America, an enthusiastic, prorepublican book that won her the attention and affection of Lafayette.

With characteristic boldness, Wright suggested he either marry or adopt her.

In 1824 she followed Lafayette to the United States, and in New York her special relationship to

the hero won her special attention. She returned yet again in 1828, to undertake a speaking tour of

U.S. cities, and quickly became the most notorious orator of her age. In January 1829 Wright decided

to “pitch [her] tent” in New York City. “All things considered,” she wrote, New York “is the most

central spot both with respect to Europe and this country,” and whatever worked on the Hudson

would soon “spread far and wide.”

Wright’s support from the likes of Golden evaporated even before her six-lecture series ended.

Not only were the gentry unsettled that a woman was speaking to large sexually mixed audiences, they

were appalled by what she was saying. William Leete Stone, editor of the Commercial Advertiser,

championed many of the same causes Fanny stood for—he admired Lafayette and supported Greek



independence—but Wright’s attacks on clergymen and Christianity drove him to near-pathological

rage. Declaring that she had “unsexed herself,” he denounced “her pestilent doctrines” and labeled

her a “bold blasphemer, and a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness.” Newspapers attacked her

boarding-school idea as an infringement of parental rights and an assault on the family and refused to

print letters written on her behalf. Old friends denounced her. Society refused to receive her. “Fanny

Wrightism” became an epithet in gentry circles and would remain one for decades.

By the time Wright’s fifth lecture got underway, opponents had moved from words to deeds,

setting a barrel full of oil of turpentine afire at the entrance door. Suffocating smoke billowed up the

staircase into the hall above, touching off a panic-stricken race to escape. None of this daunted her

followers, including a young Brooklyn carpenter and follower of the radical Quaker Elias Hicks,

Walter Whitman. Heartened by this support, Wright dug in. She began publication of the Free

Enquirer, printed by George Henry Evans, aimed at the city’s working class (Whitman became a

subscriber). The Free Enquirer declared war on “priestcraft,” fought the Sabbatarians, attacked legal

disabilities of women, and wrote respectfully of birth control.

In April 1829, for seven thousand dollars, Wright bought the old Ebenezer Baptist Church on

Broome Street near the Bowery, in the heart of an artisanal neighborhood. She remodeled it to include

a Greek-columned facade and rechristened it the Hall of Science; its front window, which faced a

Bible repository across the street, was cheekily festooned with pictures of radical heroes (Paine,

Shelley, Godwin). On April 26 Wright gave an opening address dedicating the hall to promulgating

“universal knowledge” and to helping working people apply rational standards to the problems of the

age.

The Hall of Science, a radical counterpart of the gentry’s athenaeum and the evan​gelicals’

missions, offered a day school and a deist Sunday school where working-class youngsters could learn

reading, writing, and arithmetic using texts shorn of biblical reference. Its main focus, however, was

adult education. The Hall of Science had a bookstore and a circulating library, well stocked with

editions of Wright’s pamphlets. It offered speeches and debates every Sunday—admission ten cents

—and the twelvehundred-seat hall was regularly filled. Free lectures were offered as well on

mathematics, anatomy, geometry, chemistry, natural history, and debating, all aimed at preparing

workingmen to think, speak, and legislate for themselves.

ARISTOCRATS AND DEMOCRATS



Political activism was the more attractive to crowds at the Hall of Science because in the late 1820s

remaining constraints on popular participation had just been dismantled. Even after the 1804 law had

lowered suffrage requirements for city dwellers, large numbers of tenants, clerks, journeymen, and

laborers had still lacked sufficient property to vote. Indeed the growth of propertylessness worsened

the situation. As of 1821 threequarters of New York City’s male population could not vote for

governor or state senator (women couldn’t vote at all), and even the less rigorous requirements for

casting a ballot for assemblyman or congressman still barred roughly a third of the electorate. Popular

participation was further circumscribed by the fact that power to select most state, county, and

municipal officials—nearly fifteen thousand in all as of 1821, including the mayor of New York City

—was still vested in the Council of Appointment consisting of the governor and four senators. The

Council of Revision, yet another undemocratic body, retained the right to veto any act of the

legislature.



The 1819 recession had quickened demands for political reform. Debtors petitioned the state

legislature for assistance but were refused. Many believed this disregard for their interests was a

function of the property qualifications that disfranchised them. A clamor went up for ending electoral

restrictions, now characterized as undemocratic holdovers from the colonial era.

What finally battered down the old constraints was the thrust and parry of electoral politics. The

Federalists’ opposition to the War of 1812 had been their undoing, and they did not long survive the

truce. Their Democratic-Republican antagonists, however, soon divided into two factions: those who

backed De Witt Clinton, and those who followed Tammany Hall and the upstate Bucktails led by

Martin Van Buren, a successful country lawyer who had defended tenants and small landowners

against the Hudson River manor lords.

Tammanyites and Bucktails denounced Clinton as an aristocrat. With his autocratic style and

ruthless wielding of the Council of Appointment’s patronage power, Clinton, his enemies charged,

was bent on perpetuating the eighteenth-century patrician system of family and personal factions. The

Democrats, on the other hand, proclaimed themselves a modern political party whose very structure,

which relied on open-to-all caucuses to select candidates and policies by majority vote, was

responsive to the popular will.

Clintonians and Tammanyites competed for popular support. The governor focused on wooing the

Irish, with the aid of his good friend Thomas Addis Emmet. Clinton had successfully sponsored the

bill abolishing the Test Oath (something Catholics in Ireland would struggle for another two decades

to achieve) and had let it be known, through the Shamrock Friendly Association, that jobs in canal

construction awaited Irish immigrants.

Tammanyites’ initial response to the Clinton-Irish alliance was a knee-jerk nativism. Not only did

they refuse to court the Irishmen crowding into the Sixth Ward, but in 1817 the Wigwam’s General

Committee flatly refused to nominate Emmet for an Assembly position. On the night of April 24, two

hundred Irishmen expressed their displeasure by breaking into Tammany Hall, destroying most of the

furniture in the Long Room, and sending several Tammanyites to the hospital before the arrival of the

mayor and police ended the brawl. Forcibly alerted to their self-destructive chauvinism, Tammany

now began to woo the Protestant Irish. Eldad Holmes, prominent banker and sachem, gave a toast at

the St. Patrick’s Day dinner of the Hibernian Provident Society, hitherto a Clintonian hotbed, and

slowly the party began to make some inroads.

When the surge of popular sentiment for electoral reform came along, moreover, Tammanyites and

Bucktails rushed to head it. They initiated and won a referendum—over Clinton’s ill-advised

resistance—that decreed the holding of a constitutional convention in 1821. The convention laid an ax

to the hated Council of Revision. It also abolished the Council of Appointment and transferred the

choice of most local officials to local voters—though reserving selection of the mayor of New York

to that city’s Common Council. These decisions were relatively easy. The suffrage issue proved more

contentious.

The most radically democratic delegates demanded an immediate end to all constraints on white

male suffrage. In response, the upstate landed gentry, led by Chancellor James Kent, mobilized

forthrightly against the “evil genius of democracy.” In particular they pointed to “the growth of the

city of New York,” which in itself should have been sufficient, Kent declared, to “startle and awaken

those who are pursuing the ignis fatuus of universal suffrage.” New York, after all, was home both to

“men of no property” and to “the crowds of dependents connected with great manufacturing and



commercial establishments.” If the poor were enfranchised, they would seek to plunder the rich,

debtors would try “to relax or avoid the obligation of contracts,” and factory workers would become

the electoral adjutants of industrialists.

Many New York City delegates had their own reservations about total enfranchisement, given the

rising numbers of impoverished residents against whom the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism

was then inveighing. In the end, moderate forces led by Van Buren conferred the suffrage on all

twenty-one-year-old white males who had lived in their district for six months and had either paid

taxes, served in the militia, or worked on the roads.

The proposed constitution was impressively endorsed at the polls. In 1822 De Witt Clinton, facing

clear defeat, retired from the governorship rather than run again. His good friend John Pintard

reflected sourly that power had passed to those with “no stake in society” and that New York City

would “hereafter be governed by a rank democracy.” In fact, Clinton would have one last hurrah. His

triumphant opponents, unable to resist kicking him when down, removed him from the Canal Board, a

patent injustice that won him instant martyrship and, in 1824, reelection as governor. By 1826,

nevertheless, calls for total eradication of the remaining restrictions on voting had become

irresistible, and a constitutional amendment completed the democratization of New York’s political

system.

For white men. Suffrage for women was not on the agenda, and the same convention that

emancipated poor whites disfranchised most blacks. Indeed ardent Democrats took the lead in

drawing the color line, because African-American voters had long supported the Federalists. This

was hardly surprising, given that the 1799 abolition law had been enacted by a Federalist legislature

and signed by a Federalist governor, but Democrats chose to assume that Federalists (or their

Clintonian successors) would continue to command black votes because the freedmen were

dependent, illiterate, and easily manipulated by their former masters. “If we may judge of the future

by the past,” one Democratic militant cautioned the 1821 convention, “I should suppose that there was

some cause for alarm, when a few hundred Negroes of the city of New York, following the train of

those who ride in their coaches, and whose shoes and boots they had so often blacked shall go to the

polls of the election and change the political condition of the whole state.” Northern Democrats,

moreover, had been moving toward an alliance with slaveholding southerners, a strategy that only

enhanced their desire to bar blacks from the polls.

In the end, Peter A. Jay, an abolitionist like his father, John Jay, prevailed on the convention’s

majority not to exclude all black men but only those who didn’t pay taxes on $250 worth of property.

This proved acceptable, as Democrats were quite confident that the provision would effectively

exclude African Americans. They were right. In 1826, of a total black population of 12,499 in New

York County, only sixty were taxed at all, and of these only sixteen qualified to vote. New York was

to remain a republic—or a democracy, as it was now increasingly called—of white males.

TAMMANY DEMOCRACY



The Democratic Party, which now unequivocally defined all European immigrants as “white,”

vigorously cultivated newcomers. It established a “naturalization bureau” to hurry new voters into

being; held special meetings for Irish, French, and German immigrants; placed influential Irishmen on

local tickets, and dispensed patronage to ethnic supporters. Within a few years, an estimated onethird of Democratic voters would be of foreign birth, and Philip Hone would be complaining that



Irishmen “decide the elections in the city of New York.”

In 1828 Tammany solidified its position by helping make Andrew Jackson president. Jackson had

received the largest number of electoral votes for the presidency in 1824. However, failing of a

majority, he had been defeated in the House of Representatives, which elected John Quincy Adams in

what Democrats charged was a “corrupt bargain.” Tammanyites itched to support the popular war

hero in the 1828 rematch but were at first dissuaded by the fact that his biggest supporter in New

York was De Witt Clinton. Eventually Martin Van Buren, his eyes on national prizes, made peace

with Clinton and swung the Democrats behind Jackson. Clinton’s unexpected death that year removed

any remaining reservations.

During the campaign, Tammanyites sponsored elaborate dinners to commemorate the Battle of

New Orleans—packing sixteen hundred into the Long Room and holding smaller affairs in all the

wards. They established Hickory Clubs throughout the city, which ceremonially planted hickory trees

(Jackson was known as Old Hickory) and then retired to local taverns to toast the general’s health.

They reminded Irish audiences that Jackson was their compatriot and had humiliated their British

oppressors. New York (city and state) went for Jackson and also sent Martin Van Buren to the

governor’s mansion, a position he soon resigned to become Jackson’s secretary of state.

Though Tammany trumpeted Jackson’s election as the triumph of democracy, some of the demos

thought otherwise, pointing to the fact that the commanding heights of the Democratic Party were

occupied by the mercantile elite itself. In truth, the Tammany Society, the party’s inner sanctum,

embraced many well-connected attorneys, merchants, bankers, and entrepreneurial craftsmen. Such

men often effectively dominated as well the ward committees and caucuses that chose candidates for

the Common Council, as only they, or career politicians, could afford to undertake such timeconsuming, unpaid political activity. Rich men remained vigorously involved in the electoral arena

because they were determined to keep a firm hand on the public tiller. In 1829, when a convention to

draw up a new city charter was proposed, Philip Hone and a large number of civic notables ran for

delegate, lest others, as Hone put it, adopt “indiscreet measures”; 60 percent of those elected were

wealthy men, many of them from prominent families.

As a result, in 1826 two-thirds of the Common Council were well-off or extremely wealthy men.

(Across the river, 75 percent of Brooklyn’s identifiable trustees and aldermen hailed from rich

families through most of the 1830s.) The mayors, when the council appointed—among them

Cadwallader Golden, Walter Bowne, Philip Hone, and Gideon Lee—tended to be affluent as well.

The strong presence of elite gentlemen in the party’s leadership was one reason that, for all the

Democrats’ rhetorical populism, when a nascent labor movement emerged in New York during the

late 1820s, it insisted quite forcefully that Tammany did not speak for or address the issues about

which its membership was concerned. Within a year of the Jacksonian Democrats’ victory, therefore,

the city’s workingmen launched an independent political party that advanced a very different vision of

New York’s future.

WORKERS AND “BOSSES”



During the 1820s the transformation of the trades had accelerated. Craft work had grown more

subdivided, less respected. In printing, entrepreneurs bought presses and hired “halfway journeymen”

who had not completed full apprenticeship. In marine construction, nearly all shipwrights now

worked as wage-earners for boatyard owners. In the building trades, speculative developers let out



competitive bids to contractor-entrepreneurs who agreed to erect structures for a package price; they

in turn subcontracted the actual work to builders, who subdivided the labor among crews of

semiskilled carpenters and masons, thus circumventing experienced journeymen, whose status and

pay eroded further.

Journeymen, recognizing that their employers were more often antagonists than craft-partners,

began to draw sharper lines of demarcation within the trades. In 1816 journeyman printers banned

employers from their meetings. Masons followed suit in 1819. Cabinetmakers, chair makers, ship

carpenters, caulkers, cordwainers, coopers, house carpenters, and tailors—all established

journeymen’s societies. Like the groups formed at the turn of the century, these remained primarily

fraternal associations, which provided benefits to sick and elderly members, arranged recreational

outings, and marched together in civic parades. Increasingly, however, they also operated as labor

unions and began appealing to the public for support against capitalizing masters, whom they branded

as self-seekers whose “only object is to accumulate money.”

Before 1825 journeymen’s associations rarely engaged in strikes. One reason for such caution was

that the press uniformly and vehemently condemned such actions as unrepublican and cast participants

as criminals consorting against the public interest, rather than as aggrieved members of the larger

community. In addition, the state refused to grant such organizations charters unless they explicitly

included provisions disavowing any intention of regulating work or wages.

Nor was it always clear who the enemy was. Many small masters were as badly squeezed as their

journeymen. Many upheld the leather-aproned camaraderie of the Trades, refused to sweat more out

of their workers, balked at hiring cheaper unskilled labor, and marched with their employees on civic

occasions. But they faced sharp competition and grim choices. Either they struggled on as principled

but ever poorer independents; or they became subcontractors to merchants and/or large manufacturers

and thus accomplices in the degradation of their trade; or they themselves tumbled into permanent

wage work. With the distinction between small master and journeyman fast disintegrating, New

York’s working people began, as early as 1817, to employ a new term to describe their entrepreneuremployers: “boss,” derived from baas, the Dutch word for master.

In the 1820s laborers were more aggressive than skilled artisans, in part because wage

differentials between unskilled and skilled workers kept rising sharply, in part because working

conditions were particularly hard. The riggers and stevedores who fitted ships for sea and loaded or

unloaded goods, for instance, faced long hours, low pay, and intermittent employment (winters were

slack time, and the waterfront instantly registered any curtailment of trade).

In March 1825, accordingly, these waterfront workers (both white and black) marched along the

wharves nearly a thousand strong, chanting, “Leave off work, leave off work.” Forcing all

dockworkers to join them, they effectively shut down the port. Police arrested the leaders and

dispersed the strikers. But 1828 brought additional protests; shipowners reduced wages during a

trade slump, and hundreds of strikers rolled along the East River wharves, knocking down and

beating up nonstriking workers, then crossed to the Hudson River docks, where they showered a Le

Havre packet with ballast stones. The merchant community was not about to put up with anything that

threatened its port’s new reputation for regularity and efficiency, and in short order the mayor,

several magistrates, a posse of constables, and a troop of cavalry put the strikers down.

Labor violence also broke out that year in Greenwich Village, where handloom weavers, most of

them British and Irish immigrants, struck for higher wages. In late June, employing a tactic used



hundreds of times in England during that period, one anonymous weaver threw a note through the

window of Alexander Knox, the city’s leading textile employer. Addressed to “Boss Nox,” the

crudely lettered warning from “the Black Cat” advised him to “either Quit the Business Or else pay

the price you ought to for if you don’t you will be fixed.” When several weavers continued to work

for Knox at a lower wage, scores of angry journeymen stormed the shop and cut webs off looms.

Such outbursts received no support from skilled workers. Nor did the country’s first all-female

strike, in 1825, when tailoresses turned out. Indeed male tailors refused to allow women in their

organization and sought to drive them out of the trade altogether. Seamstresses had been garnering

much of the slop work on which many tailors depended, and already in 1819 one journeyman had

expostulated in print: “Is it reasonable that the best of workmen should be unemployed half of the

year” because “mercenary” employers knew that “women work cheaper than men?” Ignoring

women’s own survival needs, the men demanded a “family wage” for themselves—the “natural”

breadwinners—which would enable them to keep their women at home, thus restricting labor

competition while reaping the benefits of a wife’s housework. Faced with lack of male support, and

possibly inspired by Fanny Wright’s Jacobin feminism, an independent Tailoresses Society emerged

in 1831, asserting in a startling departure from conventional wisdom about female dependency: “Long

have the poor tailoresses of this city borne their oppression in silence,” but “patience is no longer a

virtue.” The women embarked on a months-long strike—“If we do not come forth in our own

defence,” unionist Sarah Monroe asked, “what will become of us?”—but, cut off from male support,

their effort withered and their group disbanded. Master and merchant tailors continued to hire ever

larger numbers, for ever lower wages, until by the 1830s some employers had as many as five

hundred women outworkers sewing coarse “Negro cottons” for export to the slave South.

The quiescence of New York’s skilled craftsmen was misleading, however, for their growing

resentments were about to explode, but in the world of politics, not production. They would be

galvanized, in part, by analyses advanced by two self-taught mechanic-intellectuals, which set

workplace developments in the context of a larger and more menacing threat to the city, and to the

republic itself.

In 1826 Langton Byllesby, a thirty-seven-year-old printer of English ancestry who had failed as an

independent master, was doing wage-work as a proofreader at Harper Brothers, New York’s largest

shop. In that same year he brought out Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth,

a book in which he predicted that New York City would soon match London’s levels of crime,

pauperism, and spending on prisons and welfare. Where Byllesby’s analysis differed from the equally

gloomy reports of the gentry-run Society for the Prevention of Pauperism was in refusing to put the

blame on working-class slatterns and slackards.

Instead Byllesby faulted the rich. It was they, he said, who were plunging the producing majority

into “resourceless distress, and intense misery.” Merchant capitalists fostered rampant speculation.

Auctioneers like Philip Hone got rich by drowning local industry in a flood of cheap British imports.

The wealthy deployed new labor-saving machinery but harvested its benefits for themselves. Bankers

monopolized credit and manipulated money for private gain. Landlords, having seized far more than

their fair share of the soil in the old days, were now able to wax fat on levied rent-tribute.

Hard work, thrift, and the other practices recommended in the gentry’s book of virtues would

never offset such class advantages, Byllesby said. Instead, city tradesmen should supplant the

competitive production system with a cooperative one, by pooling their shops and tools, then offering



equal pay for equal labor. Producers, moreover, should use their newly expanded political power to

tackle the privileged position of parasitic merchants, bankers, lawyers, and bureaucrats. In particular,

speculative uses of land should be forbidden, and land ownership restricted by need and use.

Thomas Skidmore had an even more incendiary analysis. The Connecticut-born Skidmore had

been a peripatetic teacher up and down the eastern seaboard, then a tin​kerer-inventor seeking ways

to improve the manufacture of gunpowder and paper. When he moved to New York City in 1819, he

labored as a machinist, worked on an improved telescope, and read widely in radical political

philosophy and political economy, including Byllesby and Robert Owen.

In 1829 Skidmore issued The Rights of Man to Property! This tract not only lengthened Paine’s

title but also deepened his argument. Skidmore attacked existing property relations as the ill-gotten

fruits of a corrupt, colonial-era disposition of vast grants to a few landed proprietors and the ensuing

failure to recycle this property over time to the wider community. As long as property remained “so

enormously unequal” in its distribution, Skidmore argued, “those who possess it will live on the labor

of others.” In addition to private property, Skidmore said, private banks, privately owned factories,

and private educational institutions also worked to replenish the wealthy while depleting the workers.

The solution was not education, pace Wright and Owen. Maldistribution of wealth was not the effect

of knowledge inequality but its cause. Instead, journeymen and small masters—the backbone of the

producing class—should use their political power to force an equal division of property, achieving

redistribution by changing inheritance practices. Banks and manufactories should be publicly run.

Land, the basis of republican independence, should no longer be treated as a commodity. “Why not

sell the winds of heaven,” Skidmore asked, “that man might not breathe without price?”

Skidmore’s goal was a patriarchal utopia of free and independent producers in which there would

be “no lenders, no borrowers; no landlords, no tenants; no masters, no journeymen; no Wealth, no

Want.” To achieve this, men of modest fortunes had to combine with the propertyless poor and take

electoral control of the government.

Both Skidmore and Byllesby believed something had gone terribly wrong in city and country, that

social inequality and privilege were on the rise, that the republic was being undermined from within,

that the new industrial system was immoral in its promotion of a lust for quick riches, individualism

over community, and speculation, gambling, and usury. Such propositions had deep roots in the

republican tradition. So did the argument that nonproducing parasites were able to appropriate the

wealth labor created because government had granted them monopolistic rights. This diagnosis came

bundled with its own prescription: the producing classes should elect men who would abolish the

monopolies that bred aristocrats.

WORKINGMEN’S ADVOCATES



In April 1829 a crowd of more than five thousand mechanics turned out for a meeting in the Bowery

to protest a rumored scheme by employers to lengthen the ten-hour day. After resolving to fight any

such move, the gathering appointed a Committee of Fifty and instructed it to prepare a report on “the

causes of the present condition of the poor.” In setting up this counterpart of the Society for the

Prevention of Pauperism “great care was taken to have no ‘Boss’ on the committee,” recalled George

Henry Evans, one of the workingmen’s leaders and the party’s first historian. The committee labored

over summer and fall, under the influence of member Thomas Skidmore.

On October 19 another mass meeting of “Mechanics and other Working Men” assembled, heard



the Fifty’s report, and invited “all those of our fellow-citizens who live on their own labor, AND

NONE OTHER,” to join them in supporting an independent slate of candidates in the upcoming

November elections for the state assembly. The meeting also adopted a platform for what soon would

be called the Workingmen’s Party (Brooklyn would form its own such organization). They

unanimously endorsed the essence of Skidmore’s program, calling for “equal property to all adults.”

They also backed Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen’s demand for equal educational opportunity

and elected Owen himself secretary. Signaling their anticlerical bent, they called for an end to tax

exemptions on ministers and church properties. They also briskly denounced government-created

“chartered monopolies,” urging the wider community to “destroy banks altogether.” Banks flooded

society with “rag money”—depreciated banknotes—that were often bought at steep discount by

employers and used at face value to pay employees’ wages. The Workingmen advocated a purely

metallic currency—so-called hard money—employing the sophisticated argument that bank-created

inflation led to a rise in prices, a rise in imports, a fall in exports, an outflow of specie, and then an

inevitable contraction and depression.

The Workingmen also advocated a mechanic’s lien law, a plank that appealed greatly to the

carpenters, masons, and stonecutters who were major supporters of the new party. In the 1820s boom,

contractors bid low to get a job, then gave workmen only part of their pay (perhaps 25 percent),

promising the balance later. Later never came. Instead, the contractor pocketed the remainder and

declared insolvency, making it impossible to collect monies due. The Workingmen proposed a law

giving a lien on the building to all those who had been employed in erecting it. The propertied fought

this vigorously, saying it would discourage investment.

Proclaiming that “we have nothing to hope from the aristocratic orders of society” and that “our

only course to pursue is, to send men of our own description, if we can, to the Legislature at Albany,”

the Workingmen, using an elaborately democratic procedure, nominated eleven candidates: two

carpenters, two machinists, a painter, a whitesmith, a brassfounder, a printer, a cooper, a grocer, and

a physician.

The new party decided it needed a newspaper. George Henry Evans, who had brought out Wright

and Owens’s Free Enquirer, now launched the Workingman’s Advo-cate from his office on Thames

Street, where he served as editor, compiler, and printer. The first issue, on October 31, 1829, carried

the slogan “All children are entitled to equal education; all adults to equal property; and all mankind,

to equal privileges.” Only the second labor paper in the United States (the first having been started in

Philadelphia the year before), the Workingman’s Advocate would be the voice of New York’s

artisanal radicalism for the next fifteen years.

A brief but frenzied campaign followed. Bosses and the established mercantile press branded the

Workies a “Fanny Wright ticket,” with editor Stone in the Commer-cial Advertiser calling them

“poor and deluded followers of a crazy atheistical woman.” Tammany’s General Society disavowed

any connection with the ticket, belittled its program, and called on “all sober, respectable mechanics

of New York” to shun it.

The Workingmen lost, but they lost well. In an impressive debut they elected one candidate to the

Assembly, placed a narrow second in six other races (including Skidmore’s), and won nearly onethird the total vote. The Democrats prevailed, but there was consternation in the Tammany camp.

As the Workingmen’s Party girded for the following year’s contest, however, it experienced

tremendous internal upheavals. New recruits poured in, including many whose politics were quite



different from those of the progenitors. One was Noah Cook. A commission agent for an Erie Canal

boat line, Cook sold items ranging from cord​wood to country real estate. He had also been an active

Adams supporter in 1828 and was an editor of the Evening Journal. Cook’s faction, which included

employers, evangelicals, large-scale manufacturers, and residents of the “aristocratic” First Ward,

hoped to transform the Workingmen into an anti-Jackson vehicle. Cook allied with Owen and Evans

to drive Skidmore out of the party he had started, then turned on the Owen faction and ejected it too,

denouncing its education plan as a plot to break up families and undermine religion. Some

journeymen, too, including the New York Typographical Society, attacked the state guardianship plan

as dangerously visionary, though the Workingmen still demanded education for all and wondered

aloud “if many of the monopolists and aristocrats in our city would not consider it disgraceful to their

noble children to have them placed in our public schools by the side of poor yet industrious

mechanics.”

Even as the party quarreled and split, one demand remained constant: more democracy in New

York City. In particular, the Workingmen pressed for direct election of the mayor. They also asked

that aldermen and assistants be paid, because “poor men cannot afford to spend their time without

receiving an equivalent for their labor,” and under the current system “none but large property holders

can be elected.” Workies wanted an end to compulsory militia service, an obnoxious obligation for

men who couldn’t afford to take time off from work, or to pay for substitutes as merchants did. They

wanted smaller electoral districts, which would allow “all interests to be represented” and thus

offset “the misrule of the dominant party in this state, and especially in this city”—a reference to

Tammany, which they believed was under the corrupt control of “idlers, office holders, and office

seekers.”

The Workies were of mixed mind as to what to do with city government should they get hold of it.

Some advocated an activist policy of mechanic’s liens, aid to internal improvements, government

funding of education, and an ongoing regulation of the municipal economy in the public interest. But a

greater number denounced government intervention in the economy—both the grant of special

corporate privileges and the maintenance of municipal regulations—as an unwarranted colonial

holdover, a violation of democracy on a par with the now eliminated suffrage restrictions.

In 1828 the Common Council still appointed or licensed nearly seven thousand people, including

butchers, grocers, tavern keepers, cartmen, hackney coachmen, pawnbrokers, and market clerks,

together with platoons of inspectors, weighers, measurers, and gaugers of lumber, lime, coal, and

flour. From the Workingmen’s perspective, licenses sheltered their privileged holders from

competition that could lower prices. Regulations and fees indirectly taxed food and drink, as vendors

passed on the costs they accrued in obtaining licenses, buying market stalls, paying fines, and bribing

corrupt city inspectors. (Grocers, in particular, complained that inspectors had “a long Pocket for

themselves.”) The whole system was kept in place, Workies suspected, less for the public’s

convenience than to provide the government with revenue, which it could then share out with cronies

and patronage recipients.

In an 1830 petition to the City Council, the Workingmen demanded an end to privileged

monopolies in the local economy. They called for abolition of market laws and chartered licenses, the

sale of all city-owned property in markets, an enhanced reliance on property taxes for revenue, the

granting of permission to butchers and hucksters to sell anywhere in the city, the establishment of taxfree country markets (with adjacent taverns) that would entice farmers to the city, and the exemption

of market produce from ferry or bridge tolls.



The closely watched trades—some of them well represented in the new party—were ambivalent

about deregulation. Butchers, grocers, and tavern keepers were enticed by free enterprise but nervous

about it. Some butchers came out for economic freedom: in 1829 one rebel, refusing to rent a market

stall, opened New York City’s first private meat shop. But city protection had served butchers well,

and most demanded more of it, not less, asking the city to clamp down on unlicensed (and overheadfree) hucksters. Grocers complained of being pestered by inspectors, yet griped that the city didn’t

protect them from black, Irish, and female peddlers. Tavern keepers sought the freedom to sell

alcohol on Sunday but also wanted authorities to crack down on unlicensed Irish groggeries. Bakers,

after wobbling on the issue earlier in the century, had come out definitively against regulation in

1821. Calling themselves the “slave of corporation dictation,” they demanded that buyers and sellers

be allowed to bargain freely and that bakers be freed from special responsibility for feeding the poor.

The Common Council repealed the assize in 1821, abdicating its authority over prices, but continued

to require that bread be sold in standard-weight loaves, to lessen the possibility of fraud.

Cartmen, on the other hand, definitely favored regulation. American-born carters complained to the

city fathers that Irish immigrants, who had been licensed during the war while Anglo-Dutchmen were

off soldiering, were undercutting established rates and stealing customers. Mayor Colden limited

future alien licensing to dirt carting, a field the Irish quickly dominated. When they continued to

challenge the Anglo-Americans in other areas, the Society of Cartmen petitioned the Common Council

to reaffirm their “ancient privileges.” The municipal government agreed, rejecting calls for the

decontrol of carting, as the business and trade of the city depended on it, and in 1826 the council

banned aliens from carting, pawnbroking, and hackney-coach driving; soon all licensed trades were

closed to them.

One deregulatory demand that nearly all Workingmen supported was abolition of imprisonment for

debt. Attacks on the practice, which the Humane Society had begun making in the 1790s, had

accelerated in New York just after the war, winning passage of an 1817 law ending incarceration for

debtors owing less than twenty-five dollars. In 1828, nevertheless, more than a thousand defaulters

served time in city jail, without bed, fuel, or food, other than a quart of soup every twenty-four hours.

Most debtors, to be sure, spent only brief periods in actual custody, as “gaol limits” had been

extended to the lower wards of the city. The Workingmen’s first demand was only that these prison

boundaries be extended to the whole city, because most of those affected by the law lived and worked

in the upper wards. By 1830, however, they (along with businessmen) were petitioning Albany for a

complete abandonment of the practice.

Workingmen pressed their positions through a new paper, the Daily Sentinel, launched in February

1830 by Workie printer Benjamin Day and five other directors. But by the time of the fall elections,

the party’s internal conflicts had torn it apart. Drubbed at the polls, finished as an electoral force, by

1831 the Workingmen’s Party had disintegrated.

The Workies’ collapse had many causes, including factional division, political ineptness, simple

inexperience, a lack of funds, infiltration by the opposition, press hostility, the pull of regular party

loyalty, and the arrival (with the 1830s) of a fevered pros​perity that turned attention from politics to

trade unionism. Perhaps superb leadership could have offset these handicaps, and if Frances Wright

had in fact been at the party’s helm she might have made a difference. But in June 1830 Wright had

announced her return to Europe to a packed (and half-female) Bowery Theater crowd, and she

departed on July i, to Philip Hone’s great delight, and that of his opposite political number,

Tammanyite Mordecai Noah. Further sighs of relief attended Robert Dale Owen’s closure in 1831 of