People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [132]
Later that year, George Henry Evans, a printer, editor of the Workingman’s Advocate, wrote “The Working Men’s Declaration of Independence.” Among its list of “facts” submitted to “candid and impartial” fellow citizens:
1.
The laws for levying taxes are . . . operating most oppressively on one class of society. . . .
3.
The laws for private incorporation are all partial . . . favoring one class of society to the expense of the other. . . .
6.
The laws . . . have deprived nine tenths of the members of the body politics, who are not wealthy, of the equal means to enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” . . . The lien law in favor of the landlords against tenants . . . is one illustration among innumerable others.
Evans believed that “all on arriving at adult age are entitled to equal property.”
A city-wide “Trades’ Union” in Boston in 1834, including mechanics from Charlestown and women shoe binders from Lynn, referred to the Declaration of Independence:
We hold . . . that laws which have a tendency to raise any peculiar class above their fellow citizens, by granting special privileges, are contrary to and in defiance of those primary principles. . . .
Our public system of Education, which so liberally endows those seminaries of learning, which . . . are only accessible to the wealthy, while our common schools . . . are so illy provided for . . . Thus even in childhood the poor are apt to think themselves inferior. . . .
In his book Most Uncommon Jacksonians, Edward Pessen says: “The leaders of the Jacksonian labor movement were radicals. . . . How else describe men who believed American society to be torn with social conflict, disfigured by the misery of the masses, and dominated by a greedy elite whose power over every aspect of American life was based on private property?”
Episodes of insurrection of that time have gone unrecorded in traditional histories. Such was the riot in Baltimore in the summer of 1835, when the Bank of Maryland collapsed and its depositors lost their savings. Convinced that a great fraud had taken place, a crowd gathered and began breaking the windows of officials associated with the bank. When the rioters destroyed a house, the militia attacked, killing some twenty people, wounding a hundred. The next evening, other houses were attacked. The events were reported in Niles’ Weekly Register, an important newspaper of that time:
Last night (Sunday) at dark, the attack was renewed upon Reverdy Johnson’s house. There was now no opposition. It was supposed that several thousand people were spectators of the scene. The house was soon entered, and its furniture, a very extensive law library, and all its contents, were cast forth, a bonfire made of them in front of the house. The whole interior of the house was torn out and cast upon the burning pile. The marble portico in front, and a great portion of the front wall were torn down by about 11 o’clock. . . . They proceeded to that of the mayor of the city, Jesse Hunt, esq. broke it open, took out the furniture, and burnt it before the door. . . .
During those years, trade unions were forming. (Philip Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the U.S. tells the story in rich detail.) The courts called them conspiracies to restrain trade and therefore illegal, as when in New York twenty-five members of the Union Society of Journeymen Tailors were found guilty of “conspiracy to injure trade, riot, assault, battery.” The judge, levying fines, said: “In this favored land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all. . . . Every American knows that or ought to know that he has no better friend than the laws and that he needs no artificial combination for his protection. They are of foreign origin and I am led to believe mainly upheld by foreigners.”
A handbill was then circulated throughout the city:
The Rich Against the Poor!
Judge Edwards,