Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [484]
The tailors’ trial began in May, Judge Ogden Edwards presiding. Edwards, a Whig and soon-to-be-nativist, had no love for labor unions. His charge to the jury followed Savage closely in stigmatizing them as illegal combinations. This enraged the Union. In a June 1 tirade, the labor paper warned that “if an American judge will tell an American jury that the barriers which the poor have thrown up to protect the growing avarice of the rich are unlawful, then are the mechanics justified the same as our own fore Father’s [sic] were in the days of the revolution, in ARMING FOR SELF-DEFENSE!!” Handbills were plastered throughout the city declaiming that “the Freemen of the North are now on alevel with the slaves of the South !, with no other privileges than laboring that drones may fatten on your life-blood!” Blazoned with a coffin, it summoned freemen to City Hall, where “the Liberty of the Workingmen” was to be interred by Judge Edwards.
On June 6 Edwards delivered the tailors’ sentence, levied heavy fines totaling fourteen hundred dollars, and lectured the courtroom that “in this favoured land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all, and the journeymen may by their skill and industry, and moral worth, soon become flourishing master mechanics.” Labor unions, Edwards added, were a foreign idea, “mainly upheld by foreigners.”
“DOWN WITH MONOPOLIES!”
Over the next week, union men collected money in taverns and shops to pay the men’s fines, while arranging for the giant rally at City Hall Park on June 13. Though the assembled multitude cheered the incineration of Edwards’s effigy, they opted in the end for a less incendiary strategy, agreeing with orators that the outlawing of strikes called for a counteroffensive at the ballot box. Since the two major parties, speakers argued, were as one in their efforts to “crush the laboring men,” the gathering resolved to form a “separate and distinct party, around which the laboring classes and their friends can rally with confidence.”
The word “friends” was crucial. The laboring men were not prepared to act on their own—as the Workingmen had in 1829—but they were willing to work with the Friends of Equal Rights, a party recently founded by veteran Workies and dissident Democrats. The new group’s leadership, after all, included such labor activists as Alexander Ming Jr. and Levi Slamm. Ming, a printer, had been prominent in freethought circles, a close associate of Thomas Skidmore, and a candidate of the Workingmen’s Party back in 1829. Locksmith Slamm was a delegate to the General Trades Union. The new party, moreover, backed repealing restraints on organizing unions, instituting a mechanic’s lien law, expanding the public schools, adopting a metallic currency, and curtailing banks.
Yet the Equal Righters were not a strictly labor party. They believed rather in a united front of all “producing classes”—including sweated journeymen, small manufacturers, shopkeepers, and professionals—against parasitic bankers, aristocrats, monopolists, corporations, and undeserving paupers. Most Equal Righters were grocers, tradesmen, editors, lawyers, small masters, or Tammany politicians disgruntled at the preeminence of bankers in their party. While open to unionist concerns, their core convictions were a hatred of “monopolies” and an insistence that New York City’s economic life be democratized.
The man who had inspired the Equal Rights movement was William Leggett, assistant editor at the Evening Post. Leggett, a native New Yorker, was a dashing and tempestuous firebrand, as passionate in his hatred of despotism and oppression as were his favorite poets, Byron and Shelley. In 1823, when a midshipman in the navy, Leggett’s railings against a tyrannical captain got him court-martialed