Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

backing return for their backing on its railroad projects. (From 
the days of John Law onward, there has always been a connection 
between fi nancial innovation and swindling.) 
During the heyday of Radical Reconstruction Northern white 
workingmen made some gains of their own. Th
  e freed people were 
in a struggle for the control of space, both public and private; the 
Northern workers sought to control time. In this industrializing era 
the average working day lasted more than eleven hours. In 1868 
Congress was persuaded to establish an eight-hour legal working 
day for Federal employees. Eight states had similar laws, though 
implementation was weak. Radical Reconstruction also favored 
the fi rst attempts to regulate the railroads. Th
  e stirrings of a new 
social utopianism and a very practical trade union movement were 
encouraged by the polarizations around Radical Republicanism. 
Wendell Phillips led prominent abolitionists and Radicals in sup-
porting Eight Hour Leagues. In demanding the eight-hour day 
the “labor reformers” were accepting “clock time” and a degree of 
labor discipline as part of a wider scheme of improvement. Starting 
from free labor principles, Ira Steward argued that shorter hours 
meant higher pay and that higher pay would combat unemploy-
ment and the erosion of wages by infl ation. As he bluntly put 
it, “new employments depend upon a more expensive style of 
living.”
109
 
In 1867 a National Labor Union was formed to spread the eight-
hour day demand. At its fi rst national meeting the NLU declared: 
“Th
  e National Labor Union knows no north, no south, no east, no 
west, neither color nor sex, on the question of the rights of labor.”
110
 
Th
  e London headquarters of the International sent a warning in 
May 1869 attacking both ill-founded rumors of war (between 
Britain and the US) and the all-too-real domestic threat to living 
standards: 
Th
  e palpable eff ect of the Civil War was, of course, to deteriorate 
the position of the American workman. In the United States, as 
in Europe, the monster incubus of a national debt was shifted 
109  Quoted in David Roediger and Philip Foner’s Our Own Time: A History 
of American Labor and the Working Day, London 1989, p. 85.
110  Quoted in Messer-Kruse’s Yankee International, p. 191.
70  an unfinished revolution

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from hand to hand, to settle down on the shoulders of the working 
class.
111
 
However, it ventured to anticipate that there would be resistance, 
and resistance that would have been enhanced by what had already 
been achieved: “For all this, the Civil War did compensate by freeing 
the slave and [by] the consequent moral impetus this gave to your 
own class movement.”
112
 
Phillip Paludan urges that the war’s deleterious impact on labor, 
and labor’s reaction, have not received suffi
  cient  attention.  Th
 e 
immiseration of Northern workers as a consequence of the great 
infl ation of the 1860s prompted hundreds of strikes and the emer-
gence of many new workers’ organizations. Indeed for a while there 
was a sharp discrepancy between the squeezing of these workers 
and the improvements accruing to both farmers and former slaves. 
Th
 e Homestead program allowed farmers’ sons to acquire land 
cheaply. Farmers could pay off  debts with depreciated currency, and 
the building of new railroads soon gave them easier access to mar-
kets. As for the former slaves, the disintegration of a formidable 
apparatus of labor coercion had immediate benefi ts, as families reu-
nited and some withdrew from the labor force while others received 
at least modest payment.
113
 But in both cases these improvements 
were precarious, as Northern and Northwestern railroads raised 
freight rates, Southern landowners drove a harder bargain, and 
white vigilantes sought to intimidate the freedmen. 
Some Southern black workers sought to join the eight hours 
movement. Th
  e New Orleans Tribune, published by black jour-
nalists, supported the campaign, and a State Labor Convention in 
South Carolina called for a nine-hour day. But true wage labor was 
of limited signifi cance in the South, so the impact of these moves 
was small. A Colored Workers Convention in New York in 1869 
sought to build a bridge between organized labor and the freed-
men. Th
  e “Declaration of Rights and Wrongs” framed by African 
111  “Address to the National Labour Union of the United States,” in Karl 
Marx on America and the Civil War, Saul K. Padover, ed., p. 144.
112 Ibid.
113  Paludan, What Did the Winners Win?” in Writing the Civil War, 
pp. 178, 183, 187.
introduction  71

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American conventions at Syracuse and Charleston denounced seg-
regation in public places and warned that measures favorable to 
the freedmen would be a hollow mockery if planters were still free 
to intimidate and dragoon them.
114
 But the diff ering problems of 
workers in the South and North made it more diffi
  cult to promote 
an alliance between them. 
THE POSTWAR RADICALIZATION 
Marx’s addresses had increased awareness of the International 
Workingmen’s Association in the United States. Th
  e IWA attracted 
a diverse range of supporters there, and even as senior a fi gure as 
Senator Charles Sumner was occasionally prepared to support 
events staged by the International. By the early 1870s the IWA had 
fi fty sections in a dozen urban areas, ranging from Boston and New 
York in the East, to such crucial hubs as St. Louis and Chicago in 
the Midwest, to San Francisco on the West Coast. In New York 
there were militia companies led by supporters of the International, 
and an African American militia was also said to have become 
affi
  liated. But there is no mention of sections in the South, even 
in those areas like South Carolina where there was labor militancy. 
Th
  e reason for this was very likely the threatening security situa-
tion, which obliged all supporters of Reconstruction to cleave to 
the Republican Party and its militia. (During the early 1870s the 
young Albert Parsons—subsequently a strong supporter of the 
International, advocate of independent working-class politics, and 
Haymarket martyr—was a colonel in the Texas National Guard, 
which was in eff ect a Republican militia). 
Some leading female abolitionists declined to support the 
Fourteenth Amendment on the ground that while promoting the 
enfranchisement of black men it left women without the vote.
115
 
Th
  is was an argument about priorities, since nearly all abolition-
ists supported women’s suff rage. Th
  e great majority of abolitionists 
believed that any chance of achieving black male enfranchisement 
should be supported. Th
  e 1868 elections, allowing voters their fi rst 
114 Hahn, 
A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 103–5.
115  See Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class, New York 1983, pp. 30–86.
72  an unfinished revolution

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