III

Recent scholarship has challenged the observations quoted earlier that American workers readily embraced the new industrial order.²¹ Skilled artisans in particular appear to have resisted certain features of capitalist development. They formed trade unions and workingmen's parties which attained considerable strength in the 1830s, when tensions caused by the transition from a localized craft economy to an expanding capitalism were most acute. Disputes about wages and control of the work process

19. Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 43; Horace Mann, "Annual Report of 1848," in The Life and Works of Horace Mann, 5 vols. (Boston, 1891), IV, 245–51.

20. Abbott Lawrence, Letters to William C. Rives of Virginia (Boston, 1846), 6; Arthur A. Ekirch, The Idea of Progress in America, 1815–1860 (New York, 1944), 197.

21. This and the following paragraphs have drawn on some of the numerous studies of the antebellum working class that have appeared in recent years, including Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York, 1978); Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979); Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, 1983); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984); Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1983); Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York, 1985); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986).

provoked strikes and other forms of conflict. Worker activism declined after 1837 as the depression generated unemployment which drew the fangs of militancy. After recovery from the depression, vastly increased immigration intensified ethnic and religious divisions within the working class. Nativism, temperance, and the growing sectional conflict took precedence over the economic issues that had prevailed in the 1830s. Nevertheless, frictions persisted in the workplace and occasionally erupted, as in the Massachusetts shoemakers' strike of 1860.

Technological innovation was not the main cause of worker unrest. To be sure, machines displaced some craftsmen or downgraded their skills. But most machines during this era executed simple repetitive motions previously performed by unskilled or semiskilled workers. And even when more complex machine tools replaced some artisans, they expanded other categories of highly skilled workers—machinists, tool-and-die makers, millwrights, civil and mechanical engineers—whose numbers doubled during the 1850s.²² The transportation and communications revolutions created whole new occupations, some of them skilled and well paid—steamboat pilots, railroad men, telegraphers. The latter two categories increased fivefold in the 1850s. The rapid westward expansion of the urban frontier, the extraordinary mobility of the American population, and regional differentials in the pace of technological development meant that skilled workers who were displaced by new technology in one part of the country could go west and find a job. European observers who contrasted workers' resistance to innovation in their own countries with workers' receptivity toward change in the United States were not off the mark.

Nor was declining income the principal cause of worker unrest in the United States. Despite bursts of inflation in the mid-1830s and mid-1850s, and periods of unemployment caused by depressions, the long-term trend of real wages was upward. Of course people live in the short run, and the average worker trying to make ends meet during economic downturns in, say, 1841 or 1857 lacked the mollifying perspective of an historian. Moreover, the wages of male artisans in certain occupations suffered erosion when the introduction of new methods or new machines enabled employers to hire "green hands" or "slop workers," often women and children, to perform separate parts of a sequential process previously done entirely by skilled workers. It was no coincidence that

22. Calculated from the occupational lists in the 1850 and 1860 censuses.

much of the unrest occurred in specific trades experiencing this de-skilling process: shoemakers, tailors, weavers, cabinetmakers, printers.

Then, too, despite the generally rising trend of real wages, workers at the bottom of the scale, especially women, children, and recent immigrants, labored long hours in sweatshops or airless factories for a pittance. They could make a living only if other members of their families also worked. For some of these laborers, however, the pennies they earned as domestic servants or factory hands or stevedores or seamstresses or hod-carriers or construction workers represented an improvement over the famine conditions they had left in Ireland. Nevertheless, poverty was widespread and becoming more so among laborers in large cities with a substantial immigrant population. New York packed an immense populace of the poor into noisome tenements, giving the city a death rate nearly twice as high as London.²³

Although the working poor of New York would explode into the worst riot of American history in 1863, these people did not provide the cutting edge of labor protest in the antebellum era. It was not so much the level of wages as the very concept of wages itself that fueled much of this protest. Wage labor was a form of dependency that seemed to contradict the republican principles on which the country had been founded. The core of republicanism was liberty, a precious but precarious birthright constantly threatened by corrupt manipulations of power. The philosopher of republicanism, Thomas Jefferson, had defined the essence of liberty as independence, which required the ownership of productive property. A man dependent on others for a living could never be truly free, nor could a dependent class constitute the basis of a republican government. Women, children, and slaves were dependent; that defined them out of the polity of republican freemen. Wage laborers were also dependent; that was why Jefferson feared the development of industrial capitalism with its need for wage laborers. Jefferson envisaged an ideal America of farmers and artisan producers who owned their means of production and depended on no man for a living.

But the American economy did not develop that way. Instead, skilled craftsmen who owned their tools and sold the products of their labor for a "just price" found themselves gradually drawn into a relationship where they sold their labor. Instead of working for themselves, they worked for someone else. Instead of earning a just price for their skill, they earned

23. Martin, Standard of living in 1860, 174.

wages whose amount was determined not by the intrinsic value of their labor but by what an increasingly distant "market" would bear. No longer were "master" and "journeyman" bound together by the commonality of their trade and by the journeyman's expectation of becoming a master himself. More and more they were separated into "employer" and "employee," with different and sometimes conflicting interests. The employer wanted to maximize profits, which meant improving the efficiency and controlling the costs of production, including wages. The employee became dependent on the "boss" not only for wages but also for the means of production—machines that the worker himself could no longer hope to own. The emergence of industrial capitalism from 1815 to 1860 thus began to forge a new system of class relations between capitalists who owned the means of production and workers who owned only their labor power. Journeymen artisans who experienced this process did not like it. They and their spokesmen offered a sharp critique of emerging capitalism.

Capitalism was incompatible with republicanism, they insisted. Dependence on wages robbed a man of his independence and therefore of his liberty. Wage labor was no better than slave labor—hence "wage slavery." The boss was like a slaveowner. He determined the hours of toil, the pace of work, the division of labor, the level of wages; he could hire and fire at will. The pre-industrial artisan had been accustomed to laboring as much or as little as he pleased. He worked by the job, not by the clock. If he felt like taking time off for a drink or two with friends, he did so. But in the new regimen all laborers worked in lock-step; the system turned them into machines; they became slaves to the clock. Manufacturers encouraged the temperance movement that gathered force after 1830 because its Protestant ethic virtues of sobriety, punctuality, reliability, and thrift were precisely the values needed by disciplined workers in the new order. Some employers banned drinking on the job and tried even to forbid their workers to drink off the job. For men who considered their thrice-daily tipple a right, this was another mark of slavery.

In the eyes of labor reformers, capitalism also violated other tenets of republicanism: virtue, commonweal, and equality. Virtue required individuals to put the community's interest above their own; capitalism glorified the pursuit of self-interest in the quest for profits. Commonweal specified that a republic must benefit all the people, not just favored classes. But by granting charters and appropriating money to establish banks, create corporations, dig canals, build railroads, dam streams, and undertake other projects for economic development, state and local governments had favored certain classes at the expense of others. They had created monopolies, concentrations of power that endangered liberty. They had also fostered a growing inequality of wealth (defined as ownership of real and personal property). In the largest American cities by the 1840s, the wealthiest 5 percent of the population owned about 70 percent of the taxable property, while the poorest half owned almost nothing. Although wealth was less unequal in the countryside, in the nation as a whole by 1860 the top 5 percent of free adult males owned 53 percent of the wealth and the bottom half owned only 1 percent. Age as well as class accounted for this disparity—most twenty-one-year-olds owned little or nothing while most sixty-year-olds owned something, and the average man could expect to increase his wealth fivefold during the passage from youth to maturity. Nevertheless, ownership of property was becoming an elusive goal for Americans at the lower end of the economic scale.²⁴

Denunciations of this state of affairs rang with republican rhetoric. Wage labor was "drawing the chains of slavery, and riveting them closer and closer around the limbs of free labor," declared one orator. The factory bound its workers "hand and foot by a system of petty despotism as galling as ever oppressed the subjects of tyranny in the old world."²⁵ A versifier drew the parallel between America's fight for liberty in 1776 and the workers' struggle a half-century later:

For liberty our fathers fought
Which with their blood they dearly bought,
The Fact'ry system sets at nought. . . .
Great Britain's curse is now our own,
Enough to damn a King and Throne.²⁶

To counter the power of this new tyranny a worker had only the right to withdraw his labor—to quit and go elsewhere, or to strike. This was more power than chattel slaves had, but whether it was sufficient to

24. Edward Pessen, Riches, Class and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass., 1973), esp. chap. 3; Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United States 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975), 99, 180, 183; Ross, Workers on the Edge, 75; Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (New York, 1980), 36–39.

25. Dawley, Class and Community, 82; John Ashworth, "Agrarians & Aristocrats": Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (London, 1983), 31.

26. Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order, 120.

redress the balance with capital was endlessly debated then and ever since. Radicals did not think so. They proposed a variety of schemes to equalize wealth and property or to circumvent the wage system by producers' cooperatives. There was also a proliferation of communitarian experiments in the 1830s and 1840s, ranging from the Transcendental-ists' rather tame venture at Brook Farm to John Humphrey Noyes's notorious Oneida Community, where marital partners as well as property were held in common.

But these were pinpricks on the periphery of capitalism. Closer to the center was an antimonopoly crusade that channeled itself through the Jacksonian Democratic party. This movement united trade unions and labor spokesmen with yeoman farmers, especially those in the upland South and lower Northwest who stood on the edge of the market revolution apprehensive of being drawn into it. These groups evinced a producers' consciousness based on the labor theory of value: all genuine wealth is derived from the labor that produced it and the proceeds of that wealth should go to those who created it. These "producing classes" did not include bankers, lawyers, merchants, speculators, and other "capitalists" who were "bloodsuckers" or "parasites" that "manipulated 'associated wealth' " and "have grown fat upon the earnings of the toil worn laborer."²⁷ Of all the "leeches" sucking the lifeblood of farmers and workers, bankers were the worst. Banks in general and the Second Bank of the United States in particular became the chief symbol of capitalist development during the 1830s and the chief scapegoat for its perceived ills.

Part of the capital for the American industrial revolution came from state and local governments, which financed roads, canals, and education. Part came from foreign investors who sought higher yields in the fast-growing American economy than they could get at home. Part came from retained earnings of American companies. But state-chartered banks were a growing source of capital. Their numbers tripled while their assets increased fivefold from 1820 to 1840. After standing still during the depression of the 1840s, the number and assets of banks doubled again from 1849 to 1860. Their notes constituted the principal form of money in the antebellum era.²⁸

Important as banks were to economic development, they were even

27. Ibid., 218; Dawley, Class and Community, 44.

28. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, 1960), 623–25.

more significant as a political issue. A two-party system of Democrats and Whigs formed around Andrew Jackson's veto of the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832. For a dozen years or more after the Panic of 1837 the banking question remained the most polarizing issue in state politics, pitting pro-banking Whigs against anti-banking Democrats. The latter portrayed the concentration of wealth in banks as the gravest threat to liberty since George III. "Banks have been the known enemies of our republican government from the beginning," they proclaimed, "the engine of a new form of oppression . . . a legacy that the aristocratic tendencies of a bygone age has left, as a means to fill the place of baronial usurpation and feudal exactions." Banks caused "the artificial inequality of wealth, much pauperism and crime, the low state of public morals, and many of the other evils of society. . . . In justice to equal rights let us have no banks."²⁹

In reply, supporters of banks ridiculed such sentiments as puerile and reactionary. The "credit system," they declared, was "the offspring of free institutions," an agency of economic growth that had brought unprecedented prosperity to all Americans. "Our want is capital," said an Ohio Whig in 1843. "We want, through the facilities of well-regulated . . . banks, to be able to develop the great resources of our State." The man "who should at this day recommend an entire abandonment of our credit system" was no less antediluvian than "he who should attempt to substitute a Pennsylvania wagon for a locomotive or a canal packet, or should endeavor to stem the restless current of the Mississippi in a flatboat."³⁰

Northern Whigs and their Republican successors after 1854 elaborated a free-labor rationale for their vision of capitalist development. To the artisan argument that the system of wages and division of labor alienated workers from employers, Whigs replied that greater efficiency benefited both alike by raising wages as well as profits. "The interests of the capitalist and the laborer are . . . in perfect harmony with each other," wrote Whig economist Henry Carey of Philadelphia. "Each derives advantage from every measure that tends to facilitate . . . growth."³¹

29. James Roger Sharp, The Jacksonians versus the Banks: Politics in the States after the Panic of 1837 (New York, 1970), 313; William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit, 1972), 157, 117, 124.

30. Sharp, Jacksonians versus the Banks, 198; Ashworth, "Agrarians & Aristocrats," 82.

31. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 19.

To the claim that all wealth was created by labor, Whigs replied that the banker who mobilized capital, the entrepreneur who put it to work, and the merchant who organized markets were "laborers" that created wealth just as surely as did the farmer or craftsman who worked with his hands. To the proposition that wages turned the worker into a slave, the free-labor ideology replied that wage dependency need be only temporary; that in an economy of rapid growth and a society of equal opportunity and free public education, a young man who practiced the virtues of hard work, self-discipline, self-improvement, thrift, and sobriety could pull himself up by his own bootstraps and become self-employed or a successful employer himself.

Americans in the mid-nineteenth century could point to plenty of examples, real as well as mythical, of self-made men who by dint of "industry, prudence, perseverance, and good economy" had risen "to competence, and then to affluence."³² With the election of Abraham Lincoln they could point to one who had risen from a log cabin to the White House. "I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man's son!" Lincoln told an audience at New Haven in 1860. But in the free states a man knows that "he can better his condition . . . there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer." "Wage slave" was a contradiction in terms, said Lincoln. "The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him." If a man "continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune." The "free labor system," concluded Lincoln, "opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all." It was precisely the lack of this hope, energy, and progress in the slave South that made the United States a House Divided.³³

However idealized Lincoln's version of the American Dream may have been,³⁴ this ideology of upward mobility mitigated class consciousness

32. Ashworth, "Agrarians & Aristocrats," 66–67.

33. CWL, II, 364, III, 478, 479, IV, 24.

34. Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 220–61, surveys the findings of various studies of occupational mobility in the United States. They indicate that in the nineteenth century about one-third of Americans moved from lower to higher occupational status during their lives (and one-tenth moved the other way), while a larger percentage of their sons moved up. This was not the same as moving from wage labor to self-employment, of course, since a worker moving from an unskilled to a skilled job or to white-collar status probably remained a wage-earner. These studies trace the career patterns of only that half of the population who remained in the same area from one census to the next. The extraordinary geographical mobility of Americans may indicate an even higher level of upward social mobility, for people tend to move in order to better themselves.

and conflict in the United States. "There is not a working boy of average ability in the New England States, at least," observed a visiting British industrialist in 1854, "who has not an idea of some mechanical invention or improvement in manufactures, by which, in good time, he hopes to better his position, or rise to fortune and social distinction." A Cincinnati newspaper reported in 1860 that "of all the multitude of young men engaged in various employments of this city, there is not one who does not desire, and even confidently expect, to become rich."³⁵ The Gospel of Success produced an outpouring of self-improvement literature advising young men how to get ahead. This imparted a dynamism to American life, but also a frenetic pace and acquisitive materialism that repelled some Europeans and troubled many Americans.

Whigs and Republicans supported all kinds of "improvements" to promote economic growth and upward mobility—"internal improvements" in the form of roads, canals, railroads, and the like; tariffs to protect American industry and labor from low-wage foreign competition; a centralized, rationalized banking system. Many of them endorsed the temperance crusade, which sobered up the American population to the extent of reducing the per capita adult consumption of liquor from the equivalent of seven gallons of 200-proof alcohol annually in the 1820s to less than two gallons by the 1850s. During the same years the per capita consumption of coffee and tea doubled. Whigs also supported public schools as the great lever of upward mobility. Common schools, said New York's Whig Governor William H. Seward, were "the great levelling institutions of the age . . . not by levelling all to the condition of the base, but by elevating all to the association of the wise and good." Horace Mann believed that education "does better than to disarm

35. Rosenberg, ed., American System, 204; Foner, Free Soil, 14.

the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents their being poor."³⁶

People who subscribed to these Whig-Republican principles tended to be those who had succeeded in the market economy, or aspired to. Numerous studies of antebellum voting patterns have shown that Whigs and Republicans did best among upwardly mobile Protestants in white-collar and skilled occupations and among farmers who lived near transportation networks that drew them into the market economy. These were "insiders" who welcomed the capitalist transformation of the nineteenth century and for the most part benefited from it. Although some Democrats, especially in the South, were also insiders, the greatest Democratic support came from "outsiders": workers who resented the de-skilling of artisan occupations and the dependency of wage labor; Catholic immigrants at the bottom of the status and occupational ladder who took umbrage at Yankee Protestant efforts to reform their drinking habits or force their children into public schools; heirs of the Jefferson-Jackson distrust of banks, corporations, or other concentrations of wealth that threatened republican liberty; yeoman farmers in the upcountry or backcountry who disliked city slickers, merchants, banks, Yankees, or anybody else who might interfere with their freedom to live as they pleased.³⁷

Given the illogicality of American politics, these generalizations are subject to numerous qualifications. Despite their marginality, the tiny number of black men who lived in the half-dozen northern states that allowed them to vote formed a solid Whig bloc. The Democratic party's professed egalitarianism was for whites only. Its commitment to slavery and racism was blatant in the North as well as the South, while Whiggery

36. Ashworth, "Agrarians & Aristocrats," 165; Mann, "Annual Report of 1848," in Life and Works of Horace Mann, IV, 251.

37. The studies on which this paragraph is based are too numerous for full citation here: among the most recent and enlightening are Foner, Free Soil; Ashworth, "Agrarians & Aristocrats"; Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979); Ronald P. Formi-sano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties1790's-1840's (New York, 1982); Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983); and Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981).

grew in part from the same evangelical reformism that had generated the abolitionist movement. At the other end of the social scale, Democratic leaders in New York included many bankers and merchants who had nothing in common with the Irish-American masses in the tenements except their allegiance to the same party. The generalizations in the preceding paragraph, therefore, describe a tendency, not an axiom.

That tendency was perhaps most visible in the older states of the Northwest—Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Most of the initial settlers there had come from the upper South and Pennsylvania. They populated the southern part of the region and evolved a corn-hog-whiskey economy, selling their small surplus in markets accessible by the Ohio-Mississippi river network. They were called Buckeyes, Hoosiers, Suckers; they dressed in homsepun clothes dyed with the oil of walnut or butternut trees, and hence acquired the generic name Butternuts. They remained rural, southern, and localist in their orientation, hostile toward "Yankees" of New England heritage who settled the northern portions of these states made accessible by the Erie Canal after 1825. These Yankees established a wheat-cattle-sheep-dairy farming economy linked to eastern markets by the burgeoning rail network after 1850. The railroads and the rapidly multiplying banks, industries, towns and cities owned or controlled by the "Yankees" caused these parts of the states to grow faster than the Butternut sections. A quantitative analysis of socioeco-nomic and cultural variables in Illinois in 1850 found the Yankee areas positively correlated with the production of wheat, cheese, and wool, with farm value per acre and the percentage of improved land, the value of farm machinery, banks and pro-bank sentiment, urbanization, population growth, schools, literacy, Congregational and Presbyterian churches, and temperance and antislavery societies. The Butternut areas were positively correlated with the production of corn, sweet potatoes, and whiskey, with anti-bank and anti-black sentiments, illiteracy, and Baptist churches. Needless to say the Butternut districts were overwhelmingly Democratic while the Yankee counties voted Whig and after 1854 Republican.³⁸

Another Democratic voting bloc were literal outsiders—the immigrants.

38. Shade, Banks or No Banks, 136–37. See also Henry B. Hubbart, The Older Middle West, 1840–1880 (New York, 1936), and Richard Lyle Power, Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest (Indianapolis, 1953).

During the first forty years of the republic, immigrants had not come in large numbers. Even in the 1820s arrivals averaged fewer than 13,000 each year. In the next decade, however, this figure quadrupled. The pressure of a growing population on limited resources in Britain, Ireland, and western Germany squeezed thousands into ships bound for higher wages or cheap land in the new world. Despite economic depression in America during the early 1840s, the annual number of immigrants jumped 40 percent over the boom years of the thirties. Recovery from the depression in the United States coincided with the potato-famine years in Ireland and political unrest on the Continent associated with the revolutions of 1848. These push-pull forces impelled three million immigrants across the Atlantic in the decade after 1845. This was the largest proportionate influx of foreign-born in American history.

Before 1840 three-quarters of the immigrants were Protestants, mainly from Britain. Half of all newcomers who joined the labor force went into skilled or white-collar occupations and another third became farmers. But as immigration increased sixfold during the next two decades, its religious and occupational mix changed dramatically. Two-thirds of the new immigrants were Catholics from Ireland and Germany. And while the proportion of farmers (mostly German) held up, the percentage of every other category declined except unskilled and semiskilled laborers, mainly Irish, who jumped to nearly half of the total.³⁹

The poverty, religion, and cultural alienation of the Irish made them triple outsiders. Anti-Catholic and ethnic riots occurred in several northeastern cities during the 1830s and 1840s. The worst erupted in 1844 at Philadelphia, where a pair of three-way battles between Protestants, Irish Catholics, and the militia left at least sixteen dead, scores wounded, two churches and dozens of other buildings destroyed. "Nativist" political parties sprang up in various cities with the goals of lengthening the period of naturalization before immigrants could become citizens and voters, and of restricting officeholding to natives. These parties managed to elect a mayor of New York and three congressmen

39. Douglass C. North, "Capital Formation in the United States during the Early Period of Industrialization: A Reexamination of the Issues," in Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971), 279; North, Growth of the American Economy, 98; William F. Adams, Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815to the Famine (New Haven, 1932); Robert Joseph Murphy, "The Catholic Church in the United States During the Civil War Period," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society, 39 (1928), 293–94.

from Philadelphia. This nativism was actually more anti-Catholic than anti-immigrant. Indeed, Protestant immigrants (especially from northern Ireland) were among the most violent "nativists." Although the movement drew on middle-class leaders, it recruited a large following among skilled Protestant workers. Their ethnic hostility toward fellow laborers did much to abort the Jacksonian birth of worker solidarity. But because of the Whiggish qvertones of nativism, it cemented the Democratic allegiance of Catholic immigrants more firmly than ever. Political nativism would explode even more destructively in the 1850s, when it contributed to the breakdown of the two-party system that preceded the Civil War.⁴⁰

The economic transformation had an ambiguous impact on another group of political outsiders—women. The shift of manufacturing from household to shop or factory altered the function of many families from units of production to units of consumption. The transition of agriculture from subsistence to cash crops had a similar though less pronounced effect on farm families. These changes modified the primary economic role of most free women from producers to consumers. (Slave women, of course, continued to work in the fields as they had always done.) Instead of spinning yarn, weaving cloth, making soap and candles and the like at home, women increasingly bought these things at the store.

To be sure, some women took jobs in textile mills or did outwork as seamstresses, milliners, shoe binders, and so on. Though few if any women (except slaves) were counted in the labor force of agriculture (though farm women certainly worked hard), construction, mining, or transportation, many continued to work as domestic servants and laundresses. At midcentury one-fourth of the employees in manufacturing were women, while in the textile industry women and girls constituted nearly two-thirds of the wage workers. Nevertheless, only 25 percent of white women worked outside the home before marriage and fewer than 5 percent did so while married. Many young single women—like the famous Lowell girls who worked in the textile mills of that city—were

40. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York, 1980), 9–32; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York, 1938), 193–237; David Montgomery, "The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844," Journal of Social History, 5 (1972), 411–46; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 315–25.

part of the labor force for only two or three years while they built a dowry for marriage. The middle-class ideal for women was home and motherhood. And the enormous popularity of women's magazines (more than a hundred existed during this era, led by the renowned Godey's Lady's Book) diffused this ideal through society.

The economic transformation took men as producers out of the home into office or factory. This separation of job from home evoked a notion of separate "spheres" for men and women. Man's sphere was the bustling, competitive, dynamic world of business, politics, affairs of state. Woman's world was the home and family; her role was to bear and nurture children and to make the home a haven to which the husband returned from work each day to find love and warmth at the hearth. To the extent that this "cult of domesticity" removed women from the "real world" and confined them to an inferior sphere, it was a setback to any quest for equal rights and status.⁴¹

But did domesticity constitute a real setback? Historians have begun to qualify this interpretation. The economic transformation coincided with—and in part caused—a change in the quality of family life as well as the quantity of children. As the family became less an economic unit it ripened into a covenant of love and nurturance of children. The ideal of romantic love increasingly governed the choice of a marriage partner, a choice made more and more by young people themselves rather than by their parents. And if wives now had a lesser economic role, they enjoyed a larger familial one. Patriarchal domination of wife and children eroded in urban areas as fathers went away from home for most waking hours and mothers assumed responsibility for socializing and

41. A stimulating and growing literature on the history of women and the family in the nineteenth century has made this an exciting field of study. The list of important books is too long for citation here; my account has been influenced by the following works, among others: Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984); Nancy F. Cott,The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, 1981); Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978); Suzanne Leb-sock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984); and Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1982).

educating the children. Affection and encouragement of self-discipline replaced repression and corporal punishment as the preferred means of socialization in middle-class families. These families became more child-centered—a phenomenon much noted by European visitors. Childhood emerged as a separate stage of life. And as parents lavished more love on their children, they had fewer of them and devoted more resources to their education by sending them to school in greater numbers for longer periods of time.

This helps explain the simultaneous decline of the birth rate and the rise of education in the nineteenth century. Women played a crucial part in these developments and derived significant benefits from them. Middle-class marriages became more of an equal partnership than ever before. In some respects women attained a superior position in the partnership. If men ruled outside the home, women tended to rule within it. The decision to have fewer children was a mutual one but probably most often initiated by women. It required some sacrifice of traditional male sexual prerogatives. The principal means of contraception—continence and coitus interruptus—placed the responsibility of restraint on males. Fewer children meant that middle-class women in 1850 were less continuously burdened by pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing than their mothers and grandmothers had been. This not only enabled them to give each child more affection; it also freed them for activities outside the home.

For, in an apparent paradox, the concept of a woman's sphere within the family became a springboard for extension of that sphere beyond the hearth. If women were becoming the guardians of manners and morals, the custodians of piety and child-training, why should they not expand their demesne of religion and education outside the home? And so they did. Women had long constituted a majority of church members; during the Second Great Awakening they increased their prevalence in that realm. This evangelical revival also produced a "benevolent empire" of Bible societies, moral reform organizations, and social uplift associations of all kinds—most notably the temperance and abolitionist movements. Women were active in all of these efforts, first in separate female societies but increasingly in "mixed" associations after women abolitionists made this breakthrough in the 1830s.

Women's advances in education were even more impressive. Before the nineteenth century girls in America, as everywhere else, received much less formal education than boys, and a considerably higher proportion of women than men were illiterate. By 1850 that had changed in the United States, where girls went to elementary school and achieved literacy in virtually the same proportions as boys—the only country where that was yet true. Higher education was still a male domain, but several female "seminaries" for advanced secondary schooling were founded during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Oberlin College admitted both women and men soon after its founding in 1833. Even more important, perhaps, was the feminization of the teaching profession. Like most other social and economic changes, this process began in New England and spread gradually westward and southward. By 1850 nearly three-quarters of the public school teachers in Massachusetts were women.

Another educating profession was opening to women during this era—writing for publication. The new emphasis on home and family created a huge audience for articles and books on homemaking, child-rearing, cooking, and related subjects. Women's magazines proliferated to meet the need. A paying profession arose for female writers. The expanded literacy and leisure of women, combined with the romanticism and sentimentalism of Victorian culture, also spawned a lucrative market for fiction which focused on the tribulations of love, marriage, home, family, and death. A bevy of authors turned out scores of sentimental best sellers—"that damned mob of scribbling women," Nathaniel Hawthorne called them, perhaps in envy of their royalty checks.

Therefore while the notion of a domestic sphere closed the front door to women's exit from the home into the real world, it opened the back door to an expanding world of religion, reform, education, and writing. Inevitably, women who could write or speak or teach or edit magazines began to ask why they should not be paid as much as men for these services and why they could not also preach, practice law or medicine, hold property independently of their husbands—and vote. Thus "domestic feminism"—as some historians label it—led by an indirect route to a more radical feminism that demanded equal rights in all spheres. In 1848 a convention in the upstate New York village of Seneca Falls launched the modern woman's rights movement. Its Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed "that all men and women are created equal" and deserved their "inalienable rights" including the elective franchise. The convention met in a church; one of its two foremost organizers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had been educated in the first women's seminary, at Troy, New York; the other, Lucretia Mott, had started her adult life as a schoolteacher; both had been active in the abolitionist movement. These activities constituted part of the back door of domestic feminism which in 1848 nudged open the front door a tiny crack.⁴²