Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [330]
To this the master cordwainers responded by swearing out a complaint charging two dozen leaders of the journeymen’s society with illegal conspiracy. Early in 1809 the journeymen were duly indicted for “perniciously and deceitfully forming an unlawful club and combination”—the first time New Yorkers had been prosecuted for uniting to raise their wages. To represent them at the subsequent trial, they hired William Sampson, the exiled Irish revolutionary and well-known Jeffersonian. The masters, shrewdly, retained Thomas Addis Emmet, whose reputation eclipsed even Sampson’s.
Emmet’s argument before the Mayor’s Court in 1809 played upon the stillwidespread belief that extragovernmental associations had no place in a republic. In banding together to advance their private interests, Emmet contended, the journeymen had breached their sacred duty as citizens to uphold the common good. By the same token, their so-called right to strike violated the right of masters in every trade to dispose of their property as they saw fit. But Sampson too appealed to republican principles. The real problem here, he said, was “the rapacity of the masters.” They, not the journeymen, had put private gain ahead of the public interest, forming their own “sordid combination” to sustain excessive profits while “crowding their shops with more apprentices than they could instruct.” Besides, when merchants could meet to fix prices, politicians to nominate candidates, and sportsmen to wager on horses, why should poor men be indicted for “combining against starvation?”
Judicial hostility, if not Emmet’s oratory, carried the day. Mayor Jacob Radcliff instructed the jury that the accused journeymen had indeed employed “arbitrary and unlawful means,” whereupon the jury found in favor of the masters. Not all was lost: the journeymen received comparatively mild fines of one dollar apiece, and the court acknowledged their right to “meet and regulate their concerns, and to ask for wages, and to work or refuse” as they saw fit—so long as they didn’t do it together.
Strife continued nevertheless, and in 1810 the city’s “architects and surveyors” issued an unusual appeal for calm, condemning the “increasing evils and the distressing tendency of the disputes between the Master and Journeymen Mechanics.” It did no good. Six months later, several hundred striking journeyman house carpenters converged on Mechanic Hall, headquarters of the General Society, smashing all the windows in what may well have been New York’s first labor dispute involving serious violence.
“MUCH EXULTATION AMONG THE FEDERALISTS”
Political strife also grew as Jefferson’s foreign policy handed New York Federalists one issue after another. They vilified the president for his cautious response to British and French attacks on American shipping. They criticized nonimportation as ineffectual and cited it as further proof of the government’s indifference to the welfare of saltwater ports like New York. When Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin balanced the budget by cutting back on naval expenditures, they accused the administration of disregarding the safety of American ships and seamen. When work on the new harbor fortifications seemed not to move along briskly enough, they scolded Governor Tompkins and Mayor Clinton.
Nothing, though, gave the Federalists more cause for hope than the outcry against the embargo. During the winter of 1807-8, as the city’s economy croaked to a halt, public opinion swung heavily against the administration. Federalist writers and pamphleteers made a great show of concern for the miseries Jefferson had inflicted on working people and urged them to put their trust, again, in the party of Washington and Hamilton, In the spring 1808 elections, although Democratic-Republicans held on to both the city and state, the Federalists doubled the number of seats they occupied in the legislature. Some began to discern a chance of victory in the upcoming presidential election as well.
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