Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [313]
May Day, from H. P. Firm, Comic-Annual of 1831 (Boston, 1831). New York’s tumultuous “Moving Day” was now nationally famous. (Print Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
In many trades, journeymen attempted to mitigate the loss of personal independence by forming associations for the relief of members in distress. Pooling weekly or monthly dues, they built up common treasuries from which the sick or infirm could draw, thus forging the kind of mutual aid institutions that seemed ever more necessary in a postpaternalistic society. Some of these associations also fought against the growing use of poorly trained labor in the trades. In 1785 “a considerable number of Principal Journeymen Carpenters” criticized the master carpenters for hiring workers “so very ignorant of their business, that some of them have been at a loss to know the right end of their tools.” Similar concerns led journeyman printers to form the New York Typographical Society in 1794. The Journeyman Shipwright’s Society required members to refuse to labor alongside any other than “fully skilled and trained journeymen.”
The most aggressive journeymen went even further. As early as 1785 journeyman cordwainers banded together and refused to work until paid higher wages—arguably the first authentic “strike” or “turn-out” in the city’s history. (The latter term alluded to soldiers “turning out” for combat, the former to sailors “striking” or lowering a ship’s sails.) In 1802 white sailors and black seamen joined forces to demand that merchants and shipowners raise the basic wage from ten to fourteen dollars per month. For several days the two allied “combinations,” one white and one black, paraded the docks “with drums beating and colors flying,” but the strike collapsed when municipal authorities jailed its leaders.
In 1802 journeymen broadened their repertoire of tactics to include formation of worker-run businesses. When master cabinetmakers announced a 15 percent reduction in wages, eighty journeymen walked off the job and opened their own warehouse on John Street to sell furniture directly to the public. Sales proved disappointing, however, and after a six-month fight the strikers capitulated.
Masters answered the militant journeymen with combinations of their own—none more influential than the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, which while open to all resident artisans had become an organ of the city’s entrepreneurial masters. Its members (488 as of 1798) stoutly defended their right to lock out troublemakers, to import out-of-town labor to break strikes, and to hire ill-trained workmen. Such tactics, they said, were necessary to preserve the very things for which the Revolution had been fought: equality of opportunity, unfettered markets, and the sanctity of private property.
In effect, a kind of ideological mitosis was under way. Artisanal republicanism, reasonably coherent during the 1770s and 1780s, had begun to divide along its main social axis—one version for masters, another for journeymen and apprentices. The effect of this development on political alignments in the city was wrenching. Most artisans had switched from the Federalists to the Democratic-Republicans during the 1790s, believing that society should be governed by those who engaged in “real” labor—yeoman farmers in the countryside and independent craftsmen in the cities—as opposed to speculators, bankers, and lawyers. But the divisions within the trades gave Federalists no end of opportunities to