Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [412]
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