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
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
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
Dostları ilə paylaş: |