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Immigration, Urban Life, and Social Reform in the Free Labor North, 1838–1860 Volume 1, Chapter 8 | Who Built America?
WHO BUILT AMERICA?
Working People and the Nation’s History
Volume 1, Chapter 8
Immigration, Urban Life, and Social Reform in the Free
Labor North, 1838–1860
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Sunshine and Shadow. Regular mid-nineteenth-century publications presented the East’s industrializing cities—
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—as fractured societies. According to articles, novels, and city guides, each was
really two cities: one orderly, prosperous, and bathed in “sunlight” and the other menacing, poor, and steeped in
“darkness” (or “gaslight”). In this frontispiece from the 1868 Sunshine and Shadow in New York, the symbolic
extremes of day and night were represented by a Fifth Avenue mansion and the Old Brewery, an infamous “thieves’
den.”
Matthew Hale Smith, Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1868)— American Social History Project.
Early in 1849, two Irish travelers, Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy, landed in Boston harbor after a storm-tossed
Atlantic crossing. They had met on the ship bringing them to America, and a few months after their arrival they were
married. Both were fleeing the potato blight that had devastated Irish agriculture and had left millions of men,
women, and children in a state of starvation. The young couple settled into a corrugated metal shack on Noddle’s
Island in Boston Harbor. They had few resources, but they were willing to work hard, which meant a good deal in a
country that was eager for labor. Patrick found a job as a cooper, crafting wooden barrels and Conestoga wagon
wheels. Like many newly arrived Irish women, Bridget may have sewed or performed domestic work to help build a
nest egg.
The Irish seeking refuge from the famine constituted the young nation’s first large-scale wave of immigration, and the
Boston Irish formed the first immigrant ghetto in the United States. They coped with overcrowded and dilapidated
housing, epidemics of cholera and consumption, inadequate water supplies and abundant raw sewage, and the
suspicion and prejudice that New England’s more prosperous Protestant majority heaped on impoverished Catholic
newcomers.
A decade after their arrival, Patrick’s skill as a cooper sustained them economically, and Bridget was pregnant with
their first child. Then catastrophe struck. Shortly after his son P. J. was born in 1858, Patrick Kennedy, then in his early
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thirties, died, probably of cholera or consumption. In 1860, the widowed Bridget was eking out a living for herself and
P. J. by running a notions shop.
Although P. J. Kennedy would eventually become the patriarch of a wealthy and powerful political clan that, two
generations hence, would produce a president of the United States, his humble origins reflected the circumstances of
millions of immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Forming a massive movement from western and northern
Europe, these immigrants were pushed out of their homelands by famine, political upheaval, and economic crisis. They
were drawn to the United States by the availability of land, the promise of a better life, and the high demand for labor.
That demand for labor was fueled by the growth of American cities, new technologies and western settlements, a
boom in commerce and industry, and rapid increases in agricultural production. Daniel Webster, the senator from
Massachusetts, declared, “It is an extraordinary era in which we live, remarkable for scientific research into the
heavens, the earth, and what is beneath the earth” and its application “to the pursuits of life.” But the economic and
technological transformations that Webster exulted required a radical reorganization of the relations between labor
and capital. A smaller and smaller percentage of people were able to rise from common laborers to skilled artisans to
master craftsmen, or from agricultural workers to land owners. Instead, more and more American workers, whether
immigrant or native-born, spent their lives earning a wage.
The term “free labor” was used in this period to distinguish workers in the North from the brutalities of legalized slave
labor in the South. Still, free laborers were no longer independent in the sense that Thomas Jefferson or even
Alexander Hamilton had intended when the nation was new. Free labor still included independent farmers,
shopkeepers, and artisans, but also growing numbers of people who contracted with employers to work for wages. In
prosperous times, such as the late 1840s, jobs were relatively plentiful and wages generally sufficient to support a
family. But in periods of economic crisis, such as the depressions that hit in the 1830s and the 1850s, unemployment
skyrocketed, wages plummeted, workers struggled to survive, and once-affluent businessmen went bankrupt. Some
merchants, industrialists, professionals, and commercial farmers, however, were able to turn depressions to their
advantage, buying land, labor, and goods at low prices, then consolidating their capital until good times returned.
Such shrewd business deals spawned a widening gap between rich and poor in American society, a gap that was
exacerbated by the massive influx of impoverished immigrants.
Immigration transformed the meaning of race as well as class in the United States. Some native-born white
Protestants viewed Irish Catholics in particular as racially inferior and religiously threatening. Lumping them together
with African Americans at the bottom of the social hierarchy and suspicious of their loyalty to the Catholic Church
and the Pope in Rome, they forged nativist societies to defend the white, Protestant world they valued. Some
employers took similar measures. Relegated to the least skilled jobs and the least desirable neighborhoods, many Irish
immigrants found themselves in fierce competition with African Americans.
The growth of cities and industry, the periodic upheavals created by financial panics, and the development of
immigrant and poor communities challenged old values and ways of life. For many Americans, the transformations of
the 1830s and 1840s fostered a moral crisis. The North was characterized not only by changes in the relations between
workers and employers, blacks and whites, and native-born and immigrant residents, but also by increases in poverty
and crime; resistance to religious and familial authority; and the spread of prostitution, alcohol use, and disease.
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Many Americans, including some moved by the spiritual revivals of the Second Great Awakening and members of the
growing middle class, believed that these social ills had to be addressed and joined charitable and missionary efforts.
By the 1840s, smaller groups of Americans advocated more dramatic changes in society, such as land reform, utopian
communities, racial equality, and the rights of workers and women. These movements for social change brought new
groups of Americans into the public sphere and reshaped the meaning and structure of politics.
The Transformation of the American Labor Force
When prosperity returned in the early 1840s, technological advances in transportation, communication, and
agriculture fueled the nation’s rapid urban and industrial growth. Opportunities existed for people even of modest
means to enjoy the fruits of this transformation, which created such midlevel occupations as insurance agents,
railroad dispatchers, and telegraphers. These were workers who were paid in wages or commissions, but they had
hopes of rising to positions as managers or independent entrepreneurs. While many farmers left agriculture for more
stable wage labor, some who remained benefited from the expansion of commerce and the growth in wholesale and
retail establishments. Aside from two economic slumps in the 1850s, commerce and industry expanded at an
unprecedented rate.
As the northern U.S. became an increasingly market-oriented and industrial society, greater economic competition,
urban growth, and westward migration transformed working peoples’ lives. The influx of hundreds of thousands of
immigrants from Ireland and Germany in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s offered a reliable and often cheap solution to
the labor shortage created by urban and industrial demands. However, these immigrant workers, as well as native-
born white women and free African Americans, found their opportunities for work dictated by their ethnicity, race,
and gender. And neither the wage-earning, free-labor North nor the increasingly distinct slave-labor South conformed
to the ideal of a nation of independent land owners.
A Changing World for Northern Working People
Technology led to impressive gains in productivity in both agriculture and industry. Compared to a worker in 1800, a
worker in 1860 could produce twice as much wheat, twice as much pig iron, and more than four times as much cotton
cloth. New power-driven machines—reapers, looms, sewing machines, lathes, and steam boilers—fueled this soaring
productivity. Refinements in production processes contributed too, with each worker now completing smaller and
more simplified tasks. Combined with a growing population, increased productivity led to a staggering increase in
national wealth. For instance, between 1840 and 1860 alone, the nation’s agricultural output more than doubled in
value, and that of its construction, mining, and manufacturing industries grew four times or more.
New means of transportation also transformed the economic landscape. As the canal era gave way to the railroad age,
the region beyond the Appalachian Mountains was accessible to easterners and European immigrants as never
before. Ten thousand miles of railroad track laid in the 1850s helped link western farmers to older railroad lines—the
New York Central, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore Ohio—and to eastern markets. People and goods now moved
at far lower cost, with freight rates dropping by about ninety-five percent between 1820 and 1860. And the speed of
travel increased almost as dramatically. In 1817, the fastest freight shipments from New York to Cincinnati took almost
two months. By the early 1850s, shipping freight by railroad between these two cities took only about a week.
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The Lackawanna Valley. George Inness’s panoramic painting, commissioned by the Delaware, Lackawanna, and
Western Railroad in 1855, placed the symbol of industrialization in a bucolic setting. The railroad’s president paid
Inness $75 to paint a scene showing three locomotives. The artist gave him only one train but obliged the president’s
zeal for advertising by painting three tracks leading into the new Scranton, Pennsylvania, roundhouse instead of the
one that actually existed.
George Inness, oil on canvas, 1855, 33 7/8 × 50 1/4 inches—Gift of Mrs. Huttleston Rogers, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
At the same time, technological advances allowed Americans to communicate with each other more readily, even
across great distances. During the 1840s, the telegraph made it possible for the first time to send information
(including commodity prices and election results) instantaneously across the country. Cheap newspapers, made
possible by the steam press, and itinerant lecturers traveling by railroad spread new ideas that sparked ongoing
debates throughout the free states. The pleasures and dangers of city life were broadcast to small towns and farming
communities. The benefits of frontier life, the possibilities for industrial jobs, the horrors of racial, sexual, and wage
slavery, the threat of mass immigration, the saving grace of evangelical conversion or utopian lifestyles—all were
proclaimed far and wide across the United States.
The improvements in communication and transportation pulled local markets and scattered communities into
regional and interregional networks. As canals and then railroads replaced rivers as the primary link between regions
in the 1840s and 1850s, the Northwest exchanged more goods and people with the Northeast than it did with the
South. Particularly in cities, the general store gave way to specialty shops that offered wider selections of specific
goods—hardware, dry goods, groceries, and so on. Owners, relying on state incorporation laws passed in the 1830s,
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moved from individual and family-based businesses to selling shares that combined the resources of a larger number
of people while limiting each investor’s liability. Banks, although still risky ventures, increased in number to create the
credit required by merchants who now traded large quantities of goods over long distances. A growing number of
capitalists also turned from investing in trade to investing in factories in order to feed Americans’ voracious demand
for manufactured goods.
These economic and technological changes led as well to the emergence of a new category of professionals and
managers, many of whom were willing to forego the ownership of land or businesses for the relative security of a
salary. The members of this group, who embraced the values and ideals of the emerging middle class, sought to stave
off the risks associated with boom-and-bust cycles by investing their savings wisely in new financial institutions such
as state banks. At the same time, they bought a growing number of mass-produced consumer products—pianos,
chairs, rugs, glass mirrors, silverware, and carriages—to show off their newfound wealth and status.
Dumping Ground at the Foot of Beach Street. According to a Harper’s Weekly editor, this engraving of people
scavenging on garbage barges—searching for coal, rags, and other discarded items that might be used or sold to
junk dealers—showed how some people in New York were forced to “live upon the refuse of respectable folk.”
Stanley Fox, Harper’s Weekly, September 26, 1866—American Social History Project.
Wage workers also hoped to mute the effects of economic downturns. But during hard times they had to rely
primarily on good luck and extensive family and friendship networks. Both were risky supports in bad times. Moreover,
workers hit by economic recession could no longer hope to eke out survival by relying on goods produced in their local
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communities. A consumer society was emerging in which workers increasingly exchanged their wages for the goods
they required in order to live. This entailed a further decline in the local self-sufficiency that had characterized rural
areas and small towns until the early nineteenth century.
The Shift Away from Agriculture
Throughout the nineteenth century, the absolute size of the nation’s farm population continued to grow steadily, but
the number of people working outside of agriculture grew considerably faster. Moreover, rural as well as urban
workers were caught up in the new cash economy. By the 1840s and 1850s, steadily declining prices for manufactured
goods allowed farmers to buy more and more items, including stoves, kitchenware, and harnesses. To get the cash
needed to purchase these goods, farm families devoted more of their time to producing marketable crops that would
command high prices in expanding urban markets. As a result, farmers were soon buying large quantities of their own
food. Ironically, then, the northern farmer, like the northern factory worker, was becoming more dependent on others
for basic needs. Rural sellers had to fight to maintain their market position, and competition began to replace
cooperation, pitting farmer against farmer. The New England Farmer warned
The cultivator who does not keep pace with his neighbors as regards agricultural improvements and
information will soon find himself the poorer in consequence of the prosperity that surrounds him. . . . He will
be like a stunted oak in the forest, which is deprived of light and air, by its “towering neighbors.”
Farmers were also competing with others far away. Improved transportation brought produce from the West into
competition with crops grown on rocky and nearly exhausted New England soil. During 1840, only ten thousand
bushels of grain and flour left Chicago for the East; twenty years later, over fifty million bushels followed that route.
Much of this increased yield went to feed the people of New England and the Middle Atlantic states, but some also
went to feed the South, Ireland, and other parts of Europe.
As the center of northern agriculture moved West; so too did the farming population. By 1860 fully one-third of all
those born in Connecticut and New Hampshire and four of every ten Vermonters had left their home states in search
of a second chance, mostly out West. There were other attractions to western migration. Gold, discovered in California
in 1848, provided one powerful magnet. So did a boom in western construction and manufacturing, especially mining
(lead, copper, iron) and smelting, lumbering, farm equipment, and food processing (milling, meatpacking, distilling,
and brewing). The demand for labor thus drew industrial workers as well as farmers to the West.
The surge in commerce and industry also swelled the number and size of cities. In 1790, the entire country claimed
only twenty-four towns or cities, defined as locations with populations greater than twenty-five hundred, and none
greater than fifty thousand. But by 1860, there were nearly four hundred towns and cities, and more than a third of all
northeasterners lived in them. In addition to the many small cities and towns, there were several major metropolises.
In the East, New York City and Philadelphia became the dominant manufacturing cities in the nation. Located at key
points along the now-bustling East–West trade routes, western urban centers such as Rochester, Buffalo, Pittsburgh,
and Chicago also boomed.
Immigrants Swell the Wage Labor Ranks
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The greatest number of immigrants came to the United States between 1840 and 1859, when over four million
arrived. By 1860, nearly one-third of adult white men in the free states were immigrants. A few were well-to-do
merchants, manufacturers, and professionals or landowning farmers. A far larger number, many from impoverished
rural areas, ended up working as unskilled or low-skilled laborers in industry, construction, or the maritime trades, or
as domestic servants or casual workers paid by the day.
Drought, famine, revolution, and political persecution in Europe all contributed to this massive wave of emigrants to
the United States. England, for example, had worked for centuries to concentrate land, wealth, religious authority, and
political power in the hands of Ireland’s pro-English Protestant minority at the expense of the Catholic majority. In
pursuit of increased revenue, the largely Protestant landlord class steadily squeezed the already impoverished
Catholic tenants and landless laborers. Then, in 1845, a potato blight hit Ireland, causing hundreds of acres of the
island’s most basic foodstuff to blacken and die. The blight continued for five years. Men, women, and children starved
to death; the faces of the young were “bloated yet wrinkled and of a pale greenish hue.” In the midst of the potato
famine, corn, cattle, and dairy products were all produced in Ireland, but landlords sold them abroad for profit rather
than give these foodstuffs to the starving people at home. “God sent the blight,” went an Irish saying, “but the English
landlords sent the famine!”
Landlords evicted over a half million tenant farmers who could no longer pay their rent. At the same time, Ireland’s
traditional small industries declined under the weight of English competition. People who were lucky found their way
onboard ships whose bottom decks were crammed with their countrymen. Although about one in ten died on the
journey, nearly 1,700,000 Irish arrived on American shores between 1840 and 1860. Although thousands of Irish
immigrants had settled in the United States in previous decades, this massive influx increased prejudice against the
Irish among native-born Americans.
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The Irish Harvest. “In many districts of Ireland,” says the caption accompanying this 1852 illustration in a Boston
weekly, “there are scenes like this which give unmistakable evidence of prosperity, notwithstanding the reports that
are constantly reaching us of want and misery in that unfortunate land.” Although the British press depicted the
ravages of the Irish potato famine, American publications seemed reluctant to unsettle their readers with disturbing
images.
Gleason’s Pictorial and Drawing-room Companion, December 11, 1852—American Social History Project.
“Wretched Indeed”: A Novelist Describes Transatlantic Steerage
Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, was a cabin boy on a packet ship sailing between New York and
Liverpool, England, in the 1830s. In his novel Redburn, Melville describes the conditions of work and life on
board the sailing ship Highlander. The following selection describes the horrifying conditions and effects of
an outbreak of fever on Irish immigrants traveling below decks in steerage.
Show narrative text
Arriving in the same period were more than 1,350,000 Germans. German peasants, too, faced the devastation of the
potato blight, agricultural depression, and competition from English goods. At the same time, shoemakers, furniture
makers, and other artisans faced the deskilling of their crafts as mass production broke the manufacturing process
into discrete tasks, each of which required less and less skill to perform. Economic stagnation was reinforced by
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political upheaval, as the short-lived revolution of 1848 failed to overturn Prussian rule. In its aftermath, those who
supported the revolution fled their homeland.
Other countries experienced similar exoduses. The English government attacked workers who advocated such
democratic reforms as universal manhood suffrage, annual meetings of Parliament, and the secret ballot. This
repression led many to seek asylum in the United States. Italian radicals, who were defeated in their attempt to win
independence from Austria in 1849, also sought asylum. Scandinavians, too, faced agricultural stagnation and
repressive landlords; many came to the United States and settled on America’s vast western farmlands. Chinese
migrants began arriving as well. Almost all of them were men seeking employment in the cities and mines of the
West.
The largest concentration of immigrants arrived in the Northeast and settled in seacoast and inland cities in that
region. Three-quarters entered the United States through the Port of New York. Although most of these immigrants
eventually moved on, those who stayed drove the population of Manhattan from 313,000 to 814,000 between 1840
and 1860, and that of Brooklyn from 11,000 to 267,000 in the same period.
Immigrants changed the economic landscape of the North. The lower wages they were paid increased profits for
employers and contributed greatly to economic growth. At the same time, having so many workers from different
cultures speaking different languages made it hard for labor to organize collectively on its own behalf. Some
immigrants, particularly exiled German revolutionaries, held more radical views than their American counterparts.
Others hoped for little more than a steady job and a bare-subsistence lifestyle when they first arrived. Native-born
white workers often resented the competition for work from immigrants. While employers sought cheap labor, many
also embraced popular prejudices against immigrants. These attitudes assured that ethnicity would join race as a
critical division in American society.
National Origins and American Jobs
As both the kinds of work to be done and the kinds of workers seeking jobs multiplied, employers created a more
elaborate division of labor. The vast majority of wage workers before 1840 were native-born white men who were
ranked primarily by their skills: artisans, outworkers, laborers, and factory operatives. White women, who entered
textile mills in the 1820s, and African Americans, who most often worked as domestic servants or manual laborers,
occupied their own well-defined niches near the bottom of this occupational hierarchy. After about 1840, however, the
kind of jobs a person could obtain was dictated by national origin as well as by skill, sex, and race. This transformed the
face of America’s labor force and further complicated the ability of workers to unite around common grievances.
In general, the only work in the United States open to Irish men was unskilled and temporary. After the mid 1840s,
Irish immigrants dominated day labor in most coastal towns and cities and formed the majority of workers on canals,
railroads, and other construction projects. A visiting Irish journalist remarked in 1860, “There are several sorts of
power working at the fabric of this Republic: water-power, steam-power, horse-power, Irish-power. The last works
hardest of all.”
Young Irish women did their share of heavy work. Some families in Ireland kept their sons at home to eke out a living
on the land, and sent their daughters to America to create a foothold there. With more Irish women than men
arriving in the United States and most families impoverished, few Irish women could afford the luxury of leisure. The
largest number labored as domestic servants. Beginning in the 1830s and throughout the next two decades,
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prosperous urban families hired Irish women in swiftly rising numbers. Most families employed only one woman to do
all the chores. It was her responsibility to cook, clean, prepare and serve meals, care for the children, mend the family’s
clothing, and haul all the wood, coal, and water that was needed.
New England textile factories also recruited significant numbers of Irish women. In 1836, less than four percent of the
workers in a typical Lowell factory were foreign-born. But that proportion rose to nearly forty percent by 1850; most
of these were women. By then the workload of the average Lowell spinner and weaver—immigrant and native born
alike—had more than doubled. The heavy work and low wages that had been initially reserved for immigrants became
the standard for all textile operatives.
Economic hardship was widespread among Irish immigrants. The real wages for unskilled day laborers—that is, wages
adjusted for inflation—rose about twelve percent per decade between 1820 and 1860. Yet most unskilled jobs lasted
only a few weeks, sometimes only a day or two, and competition from a growing pool of unemployed laborers made
finding work difficult. As a result, the average day laborer worked only about two hundred days a year. Because the
wages of the unskilled in 1820 were so low, subsequent increases failed to pull the incomes of many Irish immigrants
much above bare subsistence. Under these circumstances, temporary unemployment, illness, or the death of a wage
earner could quickly lead to economic crisis for a family.
“They Were Desperate Men and Would Have Work or Food”: Day
Laborers Protest
This Buffalo, New York newspaper account describes a protest by a thousand Irish day laborers at the
Welland Canal in August, 1842. The laborers had come in response to the canal company’s handbill
promising jobs, and when they appeared, they found no jobs were to be had. Like the New York City flour
riots that took place five years earlier, a sense of the workers’ goals, determination, and concept of justice
emerges from this report.
Show narrative text
Irish families lived in crowded and decaying neighborhoods. Cholera and other infectious diseases thrived in such
neighborhoods, and, according to the Boston physician Josiah Curtis, mortality rates there equaled “anything we have
been able to discover in European cities.” Yet for many Irish in the United States, however difficult their plight, they
stood a better chance of survival than their friends and relatives back home. Irish immigrants, such as Patrick Dunny
of Philadelphia, praised America’s more democratic atmosphere. He wrote to family and friends back in Ireland that
People that cuts a great dash at home, when they come here they think it strange for the humble class of
people to get as much respect as themselves. For when they come here it won’t do to say I had such-and-such
and was such-and-such back at home. But strangers here they must gain respect by their conduct and not by
their tongue.
For Irish Catholics, the growth of the Catholic Church in the United States was also something to applaud. The church
provided immigrants with spiritual, social, economic, educational, and charitable services, and offered solace in the
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face of hard work, homesickness, and discrimination.
“Let the Public Look at These Plague-Spots” An illustration from an 1860 edition of the New York Illustrated News
showed a reporter and artist working on a story about the Glennan family, residents of a shanty district near the
city’s East River called Dutch Hill. Although newspapers and magazines failed to recognize the causes of urban
poverty, by midcentury, editors consistently dispatched reporters to cover the “dark background of our civilization.”
New York Illustrated News, February 11, 1860—American Social History Project.
In some ways, Germany’s emigration resembled Ireland’s. In Germany, too, crop failures forced many tenants and small
landholders off their land and onto ships bound for America. Both peasants and artisans chafed at the tax burdens,
social restrictions, and political repression imposed by the German nobility. But the German experience differed from
the Irish in several important respects. For one thing, skilled craftsmen made up a larger proportion of those leaving
Germany. For another, Germany’s national crisis produced full-scale revolution in 1848–1849. Craftsmen provided
much of the driving force and popular following for the revolution. They demanded limits on the length of the
working day, free universal education, producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, and a guaranteed right to
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employment. Although they represented only a small percentage of immigrants to the United States, these exiled
revolutionaries made their voices heard through German mutual aid societies, newspapers, and labor organizations.
By the 1850s, one-third of German immigrants lived in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, the three states
favored by the Irish. Even more ventured into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Germans
were more likely than the Irish to become farmers, shopkeepers, and skilled tradesmen. Given the higher wages
earned by German men, a far smaller percentage of German than Irish women worked for wages.
Large numbers of German immigrants entered the traditional skilled crafts as well as jobs tied to the expansion of
new consumer industries. Germans excelled in piano and furniture making, the printing trades, cigar making, baking,
brewing, and butchering. German-Jewish bakers provided their landsmen with matzohs, bagels, and other specialty
foods. Brewers such as Adolph Busch transformed American tastes by offering a more highly carbonated, lighter, and
less intoxicating beer—lager—that kept better and longer than English ales, porters, and stouts. Heinrich Steinwig
and his sons opened a piano factory in New York City that employed three hundred workers by 1860. In deference to
middle-class Americans’ preference for English pianos over German and Austrian ones, they Anglicized their name to
Steinway and called the company Steinway and Sons. German printers produced cigar labels and other early forms of
advertising for U.S. companies, and German-language newspapers for their countrymen and women in the United
States. German entrepreneurs also opened beer gardens, which provided music, food, and drinks for the whole family
and kept alive memories of their German language and culture.
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A German Beer Garden on Sunday Evening. Although German immigrants did not mix politics and liquor,
reformers were disconcerted by the atmosphere of their social establishments. Unlike the bars in Irish
neighborhoods, beer gardens catered to whole families. As this 1859 engraving shows, public drinking was only one
attraction at a beer garden; but to reformers, the presence of women and children suggested immorality.
Harper’s Weekly, October 15, 1858—American Social History Project.
Of course, most German immigrants in urban areas ended up as employees rather than owners of these industries,
and the pay and working conditions continually declined. Still, the entrance of a significant segment of German
immigrants into skilled crafts, farming, and the professions assured that they, far more than their Irish counterparts,
would be accepted as fully white by Anglo-Americans, despite the differences in their language and culture. Indeed, a
racist editor at the Chicago Daily Tribune was delighted to find that “our German population” was “fitted to do the
cheap and ingenious labor of the country,” They “will live as cheaply and work infinitely more intelligently than the
negro,” he concluded.
From Europe’s northern tier, nearly forty thousand Swedes and Norwegians made their way to the United States in
the 1840s and 1850s. Like other Europeans, Scandinavia’s small farmers, tenants, and laborers were plagued by
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agrarian crisis, semi-feudal class relations, and political inequality. The downtrodden groups were soon driven to
religious dissent, mass protest movements, and emigrant fever.
In the United States, most Scandinavians first settled in Illinois and Wisconsin, then spread into northern Iowa, the
Minnesota Territory, and Kansas. About half became farmers, a proportion three times that of the Irish and twice that
of the Germans. Other Scandinavian immigrants gravitated toward agriculture-related industries such as lumbering,
furniture making, and the manufacture of farm implements. Many women became domestic servants in rural or small
town areas.
English, Scottish, and Welsh settlers also found opportunity in America. The British government actively encouraged
the expansion and mechanization of industry at the expense of both farmers and traditional craftspeople. These
policies fueled mass protest movements and large-scale migration across the Atlantic. Once in the United States,
about one-fourth became farmers and many others became industrial workers. British workers brought with them
more skills and greater experience with modern machinery than any other national group. They were also more at
home with U.S. language and customs. These two factors helped them move quickly into some of the most desirable
manufacturing jobs.
More than one hundred thousand people also migrated from Canada to the United States between 1840 and 1860.
Some were refugees, fleeing the aftermath of unsuccessful nationalist revolts in the provinces during 1837–1838.
Others were victims of British trade policies in the lumber, shipbuilding, and provisioning industries of the Maritime
Provinces. Especially numerous were French-Canadian farmers fleeing from land speculation and British repression.
Some sought farms in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Others obtained wage labor in New England or northern New
York State, commonly in textile mills and brickyards or as lumberjacks and farm hands.
Whatever the particular circumstances that drove English, Scottish, Canadian, and Scandinavian peoples to the United
States, they were generally more skilled, better educated, and more culturally assimilable than Irish or German
immigrants and were assumed to share the values and characteristics of native-born whites. This assured many of
them entry into better jobs and better schools and provided them with the political influence that would enhance
their position in the future.
African Americans in the Free Labor North
No group of native-born workers in the North was more affected by the mass immigration of the mid-nineteenth
century than African Americans. Although gradually freed from slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries by state legislative action in the Northeast, blacks still suffered enormous disadvantages and
discriminations. In most northern states, African Americans had to meet higher standards of residency and property
qualifications than did whites in order to vote. Educational facilities were often segregated, with schools for blacks
more crowded and less well funded. Theaters, public conveyances, and even most white-controlled churches forced
African Americans to sit in separate and inferior sections. African Americans were also forced to live in the most
dilapidated housing in the least desirable sections of a city.
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A Black Joke. A racist cartoon from an 1854 edition of the humor magazine Yankee Notions inadvertently illustrates
the everyday harassment and cruelty to which free African Americans were subjected in the North. At a performance
of a play based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, some white members alter a seat
reservation card and, to the derisive laughter of the rest of the audience, pin it on a black woman’s shawl.
Yankee Notions (September 1854)—American Social History Project.
In addition, white trade unions excluded black workers from their ranks; white employers refused to hire them for any
but the most unskilled and lowest-paying jobs; and newly arrived immigrants pushed them out of the few more
lucrative occupations—construction, the maritime trades, and carpentry—where they had earlier gained a foothold.
Most African Americans, then, worked as day laborers, domestics, or in the lowest ranks of maritime and construction
jobs.
Despite the many obstacles they faced, African Americans fought to improve their status within the United States.
When whites advocated colonization, a plan to resettle blacks in lands outside the United States, African Americans
vigorously objected. In meeting after meeting, they asserted, “This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its
sod lie the bones of our fathers; for it, some of them fought, bled, and died. Here we were born, and here we will die.”
Whether denouncing colonization or organizing to obtain better jobs and schools, African Americans often gathered
in churches founded earlier in the century. Churches formed the centerpiece of community life for many northern
African Americans, and black ministers often served as political as well as spiritual leaders. Men such as Samuel
Cornish, Amos Beman, Henry Highland Garnet, Samuel R. Ward, and J. W. C. Pennington combined religious and
educational uplift with campaigns against colonization and slavery. In the 1830s, Reverend Cornish served as editor of
the Colored American, one of the era’s most widely circulated black newspapers. Reverend Beman, who presided over
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New Haven’s African Congregational Church, helped build a network of free black organizations in his city and state,
including a benevolent association, library club, temperance society, employment office, and schools. Not all black
ministers were as reform-minded as these, however. Some saw their role as helping parishioners accept
discrimination in this life by focusing on the joys of the next. But despite the different approaches of their ministers,
most black churches in the mid-nineteenth-century North offered solace, hope, and a place for community
engagement outside the control of whites.
The small number of African Americans who had achieved success in business and the professions also served as
spokespersons for their communities. Several, including editor Frederick Douglass, sailmaker James Forten, and
teacher Sarah Douglass, were in the forefront of public efforts to improve the lives of freed blacks and to eradicate
the institution of slavery. Yet they, too, were subject to discrimination and humiliation at the hands of whites.
Douglass, for instance, was a skilled caulker when he escaped slavery. But upon reaching the North and freedom, he
was refused employment in his trade because his presence would drive white workers away. He struggled as a
common laborer, coachman, and waiter until, in 1847, he had collected enough funds to establish himself as an
abolitionist editor in Rochester, New York. Even as a leading light of the antislavery cause, he often depended for
funds on white supporters and audiences, although many viewed him as an aberration from rather than a model for
his race. Such prejudices were deeply rooted in native-born white Americans and were quickly embraced by many
immigrants.
Wage-Earning Women Expand Their Sphere But Not Their Rights
All wage-earning women in the mid-nineteenth century faced a small circle of options, most of them low paying and
low status. In 1840 women (including outworkers) held almost half of all manufacturing jobs in the nation, and about
two-thirds of those in New England. Because manufacturing expanded rapidly in this period, the numbers of both
immigrant and native-born women working in factories grew. The irregular employment and low wages of men put a
premium on increasing the family income through the labors of women and children.
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Lowell Offering. During the 1840s, the Lowell Offering published writing by women who worked in the Lowell mills.
Contributions to the publication, which was supported by the city’s textile companies, promoted the morality and
industry of mill women, carped occasionally about working conditions, but avoided any harsh criticism of employers.
On the Offering cover, a pure textile maiden, book in hand, stood adjacent to a beehive (representing
industriousness). By the middle of the decade, the Offering’s perspective was challenged by The Voice of Industry and
other labor reform publications.
Lowell Offering, December 1845
Racial and gender discrimination put African-American women in a double bind when seeking employment. Teaching
and selling homemade goods remained almost the only means by which black women could achieve a modicum of
economic independence. Their opportunities in industry were far more restricted than those available to immigrant
or native-born white women. Moreover, in the 1840s, as Irish immigrants entered domestic service in growing
numbers, the demand for black servants declined markedly, further limiting one of the few occupations available to
African-American women.
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Technological advances sometimes improved the opportunities available to workers, but the invention of the sewing
machine in 1846 did not work to women’s advantage. The machine did reduce the labor required to make each
garment, but employers reaped the benefits. They dropped the rates paid for each completed piece so low that
women often worked fifteen to eighteen hours a day on the new machines just to sustain themselves. Furthermore,
their social subordination as women, their isolation from one another, and their poverty made these women easy
victims of other abuses, such as the arbitrary withholding of wages or sexual harassment.
“Who Shall Practice Virtue Under Circumstances Like These?”:
Working Women in Philadelphia
In 1829, Robert Dale Owen, son of utopian social reformer Robert Owen, co-founded and co-edited the Free
Enquirer weekly newspaper. In this editorial, he commented on a report detailing the deplorable status of
working women in the city of Philadelphia.
Show narrative text
Female outworkers in large urban areas found themselves in the most destitute circumstances. In 1845 the New York
Daily Tribune described housing conditions among these workers. Most rented “a single room, perhaps two small
rooms, in the upper story of some poor, ill-constructed, unventilated house in a filthy street. . . . In these rooms all the
processes of cooking, eating, sleeping, washing, and living are indiscriminately performed.” These women, the Tribune
reported, spent “every cent” of their wages on necessities but still often lacked cash to “buy any other food than a
scanty supply of potatoes and Indian meal and molasses for the family.” The winter cold brought freezing
temperatures to their garrets, yet few could afford warm clothes or fuel.
Some female clothing workers were the wives and daughters of poor day laborers, declining craftsmen, and men
seeking work in the West, but many headed their own households and had children to support. Thousands labored for
Brooks Brothers and other big companies or for contractors and subcontractors. Supplying their own work space, fuel,
light, needles, and thread, they received orders and cloth from a merchant or tailor and returned the completed work
to him. Fierce competition lowered pitifully low piece rates even further, while isolation in cramped apartments made
it difficult for outworkers to band together to defend their common interests.
Isolation also affected the lives of domestic servants. In the 1850s, more than half of all female wage-earners were
domestics whose wages averaged just over a dollar a week, plus room and board. These women were often on call
twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, and under the constant surveillance of their employers. Most found
themselves stuck in attics or cellars with little heat or light, eating cold leftovers. Moreover, these women might find
themselves subject to sexual advances by male employers or their sons, with little recourse short of leaving their
position. Servants were a mobile lot, but few situations offered more than minimal benefits, and most white servants
left the occupation after a few years.
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The Intelligence Office. This 1849 painting depicted an interview in an employment agency for domestic servants.
Although these agencies were ostensibly organized to shield young women from exploitation, they operated more
as a reference service to prospective employers to insure against the hiring of women who were deemed unreliable
or criminal.
William Henry Burr, 1849, oil on canvas, 22 × 27 inches—New-York Historical Society.
Teaching was one of the few occupations that offered women some real economic independence, yet it, too, was
underpaid. As northern states began to require public education at the elementary level, local officials saw the
advantage of hiring women at one-third to one-half the salary demanded by men. This was a profession open to black
as well as white women, although the latter were hired only to teach black children and so generally worked under
more difficult conditions and for less pay than their white counterparts. Women teachers were constrained by a
variety of rules and regulations—they generally had to remain single, attend church regularly, provide their own
wood, water, and school supplies, and avoid even the hint of scandal. Still, they were the lucky ones—women who
earned wages and respect at the same time.
Urban Mayhem and Middle-Class Reform
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New forms of leisure activity offered respite from hard work and social upheaval for women and men from a wide
range of ethnic and racial groups. Yet these activities both accompanied and fueled increases in noise, crime, drink,
and disorder in urban areas. No doubt middle-class critics found these boisterous entertainments particularly galling
because they often took place right under their noses. The city was only just beginning to divide into distinct
neighborhoods defined by income, and in older cities, this change would be very gradual. As late as 1863, according to
one resident, New York’s fashionable Washington Square area still encompassed lives of “every variety from luxury to
poverty, and almost every branch of industry is represented.”
Disorderly public conduct, whether on the streets, in saloons and theaters or at sporting events, deeply affronted
affluent urbanites. They increasingly prized dignity, decorum, and strict self-control. To watch a city’s public spaces
being dominated by the unruly behavior of workers, immigrants, and the poor repelled them and challenged their
right to dictate society’s moral standards. Consequently, in city after city, taxpayers and the officials they elected
decided it was time to curb such disruptions by investing in a paid police force. Boston established a police force in
1837 and New York in 1844, both in response to the riots, strikes, intemperance, crime, and prostitution that now
plagued large cities. Responses to perceived urban disorder took other, more far-reaching, forms as well. Native-born
members of both the middle and working classes engaged in a range of moral reform campaigns, nativist political
organizing, and even violence aimed at immigrants.
Leisure Activities and Class Conflict
Men joined militias, volunteer fire companies, and fraternal associations, and formed other organizations that
brought structure and regularity to leisure activities, such as team sports and choral singing. Immigrants founded
societies to preserve their distinctive cultural and political traditions in an unfamiliar setting. Other leisure time
activities (such as boxing matches and plays) brought people together from diverse ethnic backgrounds or different
social classes. Theater, for instance, once the province of the wealthy, was now open to working people, too. Reduced
ticket prices made this possible. In the late 1700s, tickets at New York’s Park Theater had cost $2.00 for the boxes,
$1.50 in the pit, and $1.00 in the gallery. By the 1830s, these prices had fallen to 75¢, 50¢, and 37¢, respectively.
Another popular form of entertainment was P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered visitors dwarfs, wax
figures, jugglers, snake-charmers, bearded ladies, and fortunetellers. In the 1840s, racetracks opened; and in the 1850s,
baseball parks and music halls welcomed spectators.
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The Soaplocks, or Bowery Boys. This 1847 watercolor depicted the young men who habituated New York’s workingclass entertainment area: the Bowery. They wore the fashionable long sideburns that gave them the nickname.
Around them, posters advertised some of the Bowery attractions the “B’hoys” attended after their workday ended.
Nicolino Calyo, c. 1847, watercolor on paper, 10 7/16 × 14 7/8 inches—New-York Historical Society.
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Barnum on Broadway. Opening on New York’s bustling lower Broadway in 1841, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum
soon became, as one contemporary observed, “the most visited place in America.” Offering a cornucopia of
education and entertainment, from archaeological antiquities to human “oddities” (actual and invented), Barnum’s
was the first institution to encompass the aspirations and predilections of an increasingly diverse urban public. As
the chaotic street scene in this 1855 lithograph shows, Barnum’s attractions included the building exterior, which
featured a band of musicians that was said to play so badly that it drove people into the museum.
Thomas Benecke, Sleighing in New York, 1855, lithograph—The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps and
Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954, Metropolitan Museum of Art
The evolution of the theater reveals the main forces shaping popular leisure and culture in this period. Theaters grew
in size and attracted a more diverse audience. Less self-consciously highbrow, theaters now offered many kinds of
dramas (including temperance plays such as The Drunkard and so-called “equestrian dramas” featuring horses
onstage) as well as comedies, musical revues, and specialty acts. Blackface minstrel shows (in which white actors
crudely portrayed African Americans) mixed anti-temperance, anti-capitalist, and racist themes and were especially
popular with white audiences. But Shakespeare also drew large audiences, owing to Americans’ great love of
melodramas with strong moral themes and larger-than-life heroes who took their fate into their own hands.
Democratic and patriotic themes especially pleased the working-class crowds. Most popular were those plays in which
a rough-and-ready American told off (and often knocked down) a pompous aristocratic Englishman. Audiences
cheered such confrontations enthusiastically, and Irish immigrants eagerly joined in. “When a patriotic fit seized
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them,” British observer Frances Trollope noted, “and Yankee Doodle was called for, every man seemed to think his
reputation as a citizen depended on the noise he made.” Thus working people clamored to see the American actor
Edwin Forrest, while elite theatergoers favored the English actor William Macready. When Macready performed at the
Astor Place Opera House in May 1849, a mob attacked the theater. In the melee that resulted after the police and the
Seventh Regiment were called out, at least twenty-two members of the crowd were killed and more than one hundred
forty wounded. As one reporter wrote, the riot revealed “an opposition of classes—a feeling that there is now in our
country, what every good patriot hitherto has considered it his duty to deny—a high and a low class.”
Young Democracy at the Theater. As this 1852 lithograph indicated, it was often hard to tell where the
performance really was situated in popular urban theaters. The raucous audience in this print included an
aggressively critical German immigrant (in the center wearing a hat) and a tough Bowery “B’hoy” preoccupied with a
hasty meal (on the left).
The Old Soldier (1852)—Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.
Clashes between advocates of “high” and “low” culture reinforced growing divisions in the audiences for popular
entertainments. Baseball and horse racing, for instance, offered respectable gentlemen a chance to enjoy the sporting
life, whereas boxing matches and cockfights attracted working-class crowds. The middle classes praised the
sentimental ballads of Swedish singer Jenny Lind; spontaneous outbursts at neighborhood saloons or the racist tunes
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offered at minstrel shows were more common fare among the poor. This does not mean that workers might not have
enjoyed the chance to hear Jenny Lind, or that respectable gentlemen were averse to “slumming” in working-class
taverns. Rather, the differences in access to various forms of social life were, like access to jobs, determined by class,
and often by sex and race or ethnicity as well.
Working people also clashed with each other. Boxing matches, for instance, often pitted Irish pugilists against AfricanAmerican or native-born white fighters, feeding ethnic and racial rivalries among the crowds of men in attendance.
During the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, Philadelphia mummers—bands of youths often mockingly made up as women or
blacks—marched through the city at Christmastime, assaulted members of various ethnic or racial groups, and filled
the air with fireworks, gunfire, and loud music. These events clearly reflected real hostilities between groups of
working people, but they also ridiculed, annoyed, and harassed individuals higher up the social ladder. In 1843, a
newspaper decried the “riotous spirit raging” among the mummers that had turned Philadelphia into a “theater of
disorders which practically nullify civil government.” In cities throughout the North, raucous public celebrations of
New Year’s, July Fourth and other holidays—replete with boxing matches, cock fights, bull and bear matches and other
violent entertainments—elicited similar expressions of outrage.
Urban Disorder and Family Crises
In the late 1840s, New York’s chief of police cited another “deplorable and growing evil, the constantly increasing
number of vagrant, idle, and vicious children . . . who infest our public thoroughfares.” To most middle-class journalists
and reformers, these children roamed the streets because their parents were morally bankrupt. An agent of the New
York City Children’s Aid Society described one mother of such roaming children, saying, “In such a woman there is little
confidence to be put.” The agent assumed that she had indulged “some cursed vice” that had reduced her to poverty
in the first place, and “if her children be not separated from her, she will drag them down, too.”
In fact, these children were a byproduct of the social changes and the enormous pressures their impoverished parents
faced. Rural American and immigrant families flowed into cities, filling them with children. Although some hardpressed parents did neglect or abandon their children, most needed their children’s help to survive. Sons and
daughters might do household chores, run errands, look after younger sisters and brothers—even beg and scavenge
for food, wood, and coal, or for items that could be sold to junk dealers. Boys as young as eight or nine earned money
by peddling hot corn, sweet potatoes, string, pins, or newspapers. Girls worked alongside mothers doing outwork or
helped out in more affluent households for a few pennies. The death of one parent (or both) while their children were
still young resulted in even more dire economic circumstances and forced many children into the streets to survive as
best they could.
These street children seemed to fuel the growing incidence of crime and prostitution, which was reported in lurid
detail in the mass-circulation “penny press.” Such urban disorders aroused concern among many Americans.
Prostitution was the danger most closely associated with impoverished women. In 1832, John McDowall, agent for New
York City’s evangelical Magdalen Society, proclaimed, “We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the number of
females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than TEN THOUSAND!!!!!” Although accurate
statistics on the incidence of prostitution in the nineteenth century are nearly impossible to obtain, some two
hundred “official” brothels, recognized by the police and listed in visitors’ guides, existed in New York City in the 1830s.
And it is likely that the numbers of brothels and prostitutes rose steadily as cities grew.
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Like so many other aspects of working-class life in the 1840s and 1850s, prostitution was a product of changing
economic relations. With more women needing to earn wages and with few chances for them to find full-time, yearround work at a living wage, women fell into prostitution during times of economic crisis. Some turned to it only
temporarily or episodically, but others became trapped in this life. Many may have decided that prostitution was not
the worst choice a workingwoman could make, offering better wages and hours than the more respectable jobs
available to them.
Hooking a Victim. This lithograph printed around 1850 depicted three prostitutes soliciting on a gas-lit city street.
Some women chose prostitution as an alternative to (or to supplement) low-wage domestic or sewing work.
Reformers and artists alike alternately sentimentalized and demonized prostitutes, viewing them either as betrayed
innocents, victimized by poverty or deceitful seducers, or as “abandoned women” who craved sex and liquor.
Serrell and Perkins, New York by Gas-Light. Hooking a Victim, c. 1850, lithograph—Museum of the City of New York.
As prostitution increased, certain urban areas gained reputations based on the quality of both their prostitutes and
their clientele. In New York, for example, the notorious Five Points district was inhabited, according to the New York
Evening Post, “by a race of beings of all colours, ages, sexes, and nations.” A center of poor black and poor Irish
settlement, it was home to numerous bars, gambling dens, and brothels.
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Guides printed in such papers as The Whip helped more genteel visitors and locals find a better class of brothel. In the
early 1840s, they ranked “Princess Julia’s” house, located at 55 Leonard Street, as one of the best in New York. A fulltime police officer lived across the street, an opera house was down the block, and a former mayor, Edward P.
Livingston, lived nearby, on the other side of the Zion Methodist Church, whose black congregants included some of
the city’s most respectable families. Yet such locations made clear that prostitution was no longer confined to poor
neighborhoods. Instead, social investigator William Sanger claimed, it “boldly strikes through our most thronged and
elegant thoroughfares.” But this elegance did not save prostitutes from disease, assaults, or the inevitable decline in
wages that occurred with age.
Middle-Class Efforts at Moral Reform
Prostitution became a growing concern among middle-class Americans in cities across the country. In Rochester, New
York, a canal town of fewer than fifteen thousand in 1836, the wives of upwardly mobile bankers, merchants, and
professionals formed a local Female Moral Reform Society and discussed such questions as “Ought licentious men be
exposed?” Throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, they prayed for the salvation of prostitutes, condemned the
men who bought their services, and circulated religious tracts and periodicals. In 1849, they institutionalized their
rescue efforts by founding a Home for Friendless and Virtuous Females to offer refuge to young women at risk of
becoming prostitutes (although not to those already fallen). Many of these reform-minded women were also active in
the city’s temperance society; several helped to found the Rochester Orphan Asylum; and dozens signed petitions on
behalf of the abolition of slavery.
Earlier reformers had often argued that social ills were the fault of individuals rather than society. Female moral
reformers, however, took a different tack, blaming men, usually well-to-do and native- born, for ruining young women
and driving them into a life of prostitution. These reformers believed that disseminating middle-class Protestant
values could save society. In the 1850s, for instance, New York’s Children’s Aid Society placed poor urban (often
Catholic) youngsters with rural Protestant foster parents as the best means of “saving” them from dangerous
influences. At times they “rescued” such young people without the parents’ approval. The Society’s industrial schools
and lodging houses also taught street girls that “nothing was so honorable as industrious house-work,” thereby
preparing them for the kind of domestic service jobs that made the lives of middle-class housewives easier.
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House of Refuge. Reformers blamed poverty on the moral failure of working-class households. Giving up on adults,
many “missionaries” focused on the children of the poor. This emblem of the Philadelphia House of Refuge declared
the reformers’ belief in their capacity to convert children into model citizens.
C. G. Childs, Philadelphia House of Refuge—Print Collection, Miriam and Ira Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Moral reform campaigns appealed not just to well-to-do women but also to people of lesser means who had high
hopes for themselves. The promise of advancement for those who lived right and worked hard spoke to the dreams of
many small shopkeepers, farmers, and craftsmen. Among this group, many disapproved of the growing ranks of
propertyless laborers below them, with their irreverent and unruly behavior. This disapproval mounted in the 1840s
and 1850s as more and more Irish and German immigrants flowed into low-income occupations. In this case, however,
many reform-minded Americans blamed the poor for their poverty and provided support to nativist movements.
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“Can This be the Sabbath . . . ?” Protestant Reform
In the House of Industry’s 1857 Monthly Record, a shocked Protestant missionary, Louis M. Pease, describes
the Sunday activity in the Five Points, a working-class immigrant neighborhood in New York City. Troubled
by evidence of extreme poverty in the nation’s industrializing cities, many Protestant reformers set up
mission houses in poor, immigrant neighborhoods to minister to the needs of the largely Catholic
residents. But a cultural abyss divided reformers from the people they wanted to help.
Show narrative text
Nativist Attacks on Immigrants, African Americans, and Workers
Native-born whites had often disparaged immigrant laborers, claiming that the newcomers belonged in the lowpaying jobs they held. Massachusetts educator and politician Edward Everett, for example, argued that the Irish
should be welcomed to America because “their inferiority as a race compels them to go to the bottom” of the
occupational scale, “and the consequence is that we are all, all of us, the higher lifted because they are here.” Even
before the influx of Irish famine refugees, anti-Catholic sentiment flourished. In 1834, a group of Protestant working
men, prompted by the rumor that the nuns in Boston’s Ursuline convent school were forcing their primarily Protestant
students to convert to Catholicism, burned the convent to the ground. State authorities failed to intervene on the
sisters’ behalf.
By the 1840s, such prejudices spawned a national movement. An army of anti-immigrant writers, educators, ministers,
and politicians overlooked the contributions of immigrant laborers and argued that most of the nation’s ills were the
result of the newcomers’ rejection of “American” work habits, culture, and religion. Immigrants’ consumption of liquor
and beer deeply offended these pious nativists, who linked temperance to morality. Even temperate and devout
immigrants angered nativists if they were Catholic. In addition, nativists believed that the votes of immigrant men
could be easily bought with promises of drink or employment.
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The Voting-Place. Evangelical reformers objected to the undisciplined and sometimes violent atmosphere of
working-class saloons. But, as indicated in this 1858 engraving of a bar in the Irish “Five Points” section of New York,
reformers’ concern involved more than the excesses of public drinking. The saloons were the organizing centers for
the reformers’ rivals, urban political machines like New York’s Tammany Hall.
Harper’s Weekly, November 13, 1858—American Social History Project.
Immigration bolstered the number of Roman Catholics in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. Their ideals and
beliefs contrasted sharply with those of evangelical Protestants. Where evangelicals pursued human perfection,
Catholics adhered to an older and more lenient point of view: human beings were conceived in sin and were incapable
of perfection on Earth. Although the church demanded moral conduct from Catholics, it granted that human frailty
would inevitably, and repeatedly, lead them astray. The way back from sin could be found not in a single conversion,
but in regular confession, repentance, and priestly absolution. Many Protestants also mistakenly believed that the
Catholic Church required a kind of loyalty from its congregants that undermined democratic political practices.
In 1850, scattered clusters of secret anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic societies banded together into a national
organization, and a year later into a new political party. Officially named the American Party, its followers were
popularly labeled “Know-Nothings” because members often responded, “I know nothing,” when questioned by
outsiders. These Know-Nothings sought to disfranchise immigrant voters through literacy tests and to unite northern
and southern whites against the “alien menace.” They believed that a Catholic conspiracy was threatening America’s
republican institutions. One important goal, which they shared with some antislavery advocates, was keeping the
West open for free settlement, although in this case, they explicitly meant native-born white settlement.
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Nativist and Immigrant Arguments in the 1840s
Nativist—anti-immigrant—appeals to American-born workers and merchants were common throughout
the 1840s and 1850s. The following election circular, printed in the New York Daily Plebeian on April 20,
1844, conveys a sense of how fear of immigrants was manipulated by politicians in search of votes and by
businessmen looking to further divide the urban working class. Immigrants responded to nativist attacks
in various ways. In this 1847 letter to the New York Champion of American Labor, one foreign-born worker
warned of the effects of nativism on mutual support between American- and foreign-born workers in the
United States.
Show narrative text
In some cases, nativists clashed violently with immigrants. In May 1844, shots emanating from an Irish firehouse
scattered participants in a nativist rally in Philadelphia. Three nativists were killed in the opening skirmish, ten more
along with one Irishman as the hostilities dragged on. The following night a full-scale riot erupted as nativist residents
went on the attack, burning and looting Irish establishments and homes and attacking churches and other
community institutions. A decade later in Brooklyn, immigrants and Know-Nothings clashed during the fall elections.
Know-Nothings challenged the citizenship papers of Irish voters, inspiring an Irish mob to beat to death an election
official. The mob also drove off the nine deputies sent to protect the polls. Some women threw stones and flatirons,
and a Mrs. Murphy urged the crowd to “kill them bloody Know-Nothings.”
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Defenders of the True Faith. The popular political cartoonist David Claypoole Johnston, who converted to
Catholicism, condemned the nativist rioters who burned down the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts,
on August 11, 1834.
Scraps (1835)—Boston Athenaeum.
Competition for jobs provided another volatile arena for native-born and foreign-born groups. Many native-born
workers found more desirable positions in these years, but many others were displaced by lower-paid immigrants.
Some stayed in their old jobs, resenting their new foreign-born coworkers. Employers frequently encouraged nativist
attitudes, partly out of genuine conviction, partly to deflect workers’ anger away from themselves, and partly to
undermine their employees’ capacity to organize across ethnic lines. During the 1840s and 1850s, bloody brawls
repeatedly broke out as groups of workers of different origins pitted themselves against one another.
The most brutal battles occurred between newly arrived immigrants and native-born blacks. Irish immigrants had
been forced to the bottom of the occupational hierarchy by native-born whites, and there they vied for jobs with
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African Americans. Some employers, who preferred what they perceived as “docile Negroes” to “rowdy Irish,”
encouraged such conflict. An ad in the New York Herald in the 1840s read, “Wanted, A Cook, Washer, and Ironer; who
perfectly understands her business; any color or country except Irish.” In response to such prejudice, Irish immigrants
often laid claim to the “wages of whiteness,” ridiculing, demeaning, and attacking the African Americans with whom
they competed. In 1842, Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania attacked blacks who competed for their jobs; in 1853, armed
African Americans replaced striking Irishmen on the Erie Railroad; and in 1855, Irish and black dockworkers battled
along the New York City waterfront. Over and over again, those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder
struggled to keep one step above the nearest competition.
The Day We Celebrate. Harper’s Weekly cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed a riot on St. Patrick’s Day as a violent
urban “sport.” Nast’s portrayal of the Irish, baring their teeth along with other weaponry, was typical of nineteenthcentury cartoonists, who tended to give each immigrant working-class group the physical traits that were
supposedly characteristic of its “race” and place in a social hierarchy.
Harper’s Weekly, April 6, 1867—American Social History Project.
Although nativists embraced conservative values, many viewed themselves as part of broader reform movements of
the era. Most advocated temperance, condemned prostitution, and supported colonization. Some even advocated the
end of slavery, joining with those abolitionists who believed that African Americans were inferior to whites, just as
immigrants were inferior to native-born Americans.
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Radical Reform
Evangelical Protestantism was a driving force among both conservative nativists and progressive advocates of
reform. Even some radicals emerged among evangelicals, but they usually joined with activists who embraced other
religious traditions or who rejected religion altogether as a basis for social change. Radicals were drawn to many of
the same reform campaigns as their moderate counterparts, but they approached these issues in a distinctive spirit.
Whereas moderate reformers hoped that public schools would help tame the lower classes and create more
conscientious and disciplined wives and workers, radicals wanted them to help working people learn and defend their
rights as citizens and producers. The same point of view influenced them to advocate for land reform and to form
separate groups such as the Washingtonian Temperance Society, through which reformed drunkards worked to uplift
themselves and convert other workingmen to their cause. The result was a tug-of-war between radical and moderate
reformers, with one side stressing popular participation and democratic rights, and the other emphasizing social
order.
Faced with more urban disorder than the freethinkers of the 1820s and 1830s, some radical reformers established
utopian communities in the hopes of creating new models for social harmony. Others focused on making land
available to all. Women came together in an attempt to advance their own rights as well as those of enslaved African
Americans. The abolition of slavery became the primary goal of a number of northern reformers. These efforts
brought together women and men, blacks and whites, working-class and middle-class activists, and native-born and
immigrant Americans. Most believed, as labor journalist William Young proclaimed in 1845, that God intended that
humanity “should be bound together by nature’s golden chain . . . into one harmonious whole—no slaves—no servants
—no masters—no oppressed and no oppressors—but in the language of Christ—‘For one is your master, and all ye
are brethren.’”
“Industry Without Drudgery”: Planning for Brook Farm
In 1840, Unitarian minister George Ripley wrote to the Transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson in
an (unsuccessful) effort to convince him to join, or at least invest in, his planned utopian community, Brook
Farm. Brook Farm began operations in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Brook farmers lived and
dined communally, and divided their time between farm work and artistic and scholarly pursuits. Although
other utopian communities, such as Oneida in upstate New York, and Amana, in Iowa, achieved selfsufficiency, Brook Farm ultimately failed. The community never recovered from a devastating fire in 1846,
and it closed its doors in 1847.
Show narrative text
Communal Experiments and Cooperative Enterprises
One of the most radical movements of the nineteenth century involved establishing entirely new communities based
on collective ownership of property and infused with the spirit of cooperation instead of competition. European
immigrants had first erected such utopian societies in North America in the eighteenth century. The largest of these
was created by a religious movement called the Shakers. By the 1830s, several Shaker communities in New York and
Massachusetts housed more than six thousand members.
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Other founders of utopian communities drew their ideas from more secular sources. In the 1820s the Irish-born
industrialist Robert Owen applied ideas he had developed about social reform in Scotland to communities in the
United States. In Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana community, there would be “no personal inequality, or gradation of
rank and station; all will be equal in their condition.”
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“The Change from Error and Misery, to Truth and Happiness” Robert Owen and the design of his New Harmony
utopian community in Indiana appeared on the title page of The Crisis, written by Owen and his son in 1833.
Robert Owen and Robert Dale Owen, The Crisis, or the Change from Error and Misery, to Truth and Happiness (1833)—Rare Books
and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In the late 1830s and 1840s, utopian communities multiplied. Some, such as Brook Farm in Massachusetts, founded in
1841, expressed Christian disenchantment with commercializing and industrializing America. More, however, followed
the lead of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and other European socialists and sought economic equality among their
residents. Whether religious or secular, most of the communities founded in this period were closely tied to other
social movements, especially peace, abolition, and woman’s rights movements.
Nashoba, April 19, 1828. Influenced by Robert Owen and New Harmony, Frances Wright established an interracial
utopian community, Nashoba, near Memphis, Tennessee. Its white and black residents (including slaves purchased by
Wright) worked and lived together. Believing that racism could be defeated only by the “amalgamation of the races,”
Wright permitted interracial sexual relationships in the Nashoba community. Even abolitionists condemned the
experiment. This is a sketch by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, a French artist-naturalist who spent ten years at New
Harmony.
Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, April 19, 1828, pencil drawing—No. 43122, Musée d’Histoire Naturelle du Havre.
The most famous, and controversial, of these nineteenth-century utopian societies was founded at Oneida, New York,
by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. Following the same economic plan as New Harmony and Brook Farm, women and
men at Oneida shared labor and were paid equal wages for equal work. But Noyes also advocated sexual reform.
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Oneida residents practiced something called “complex marriage,” in which women and men could divorce and
remarry, children were raised communally, and reproduction was planned. The system of sex and marriage, which was
intended to free women from the burdens of male domination and frequent childbearing, was highly regulated. The
community, for example, had to approve marital unions and men were required to control their sexual urges. Women,
however, gained little authority over their work or their sexual relations and lost authority over their children. Still,
Oneida thrived for four decades despite the popular outrage provoked by the community’s sexual practices.
The greatest obstacles to the dozens of utopian communities that emerged in the 1830s and 1840s was economic
failure, not public outrage. Most began with only limited financial resources which made it difficult to match the
enticements offered by the competitive world outside. Moreover, even modest economic setbacks could spell disaster
for communities already operating close to the margin. Critics cited failed communities as proof that the whole
experiment was futile. Yet many utopian residents felt differently. Mary Paul, a former Lowell textile worker who lived
in a utopian community in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1853-54, wrote her father about the benefits of her new life. In just
one year, Paul reported, I have “already seen enough to convince me that [this] is the true life. And although all the
attempts that have ever yet been made towards it [a society built on Fourier’s principles] have been failures . . . my
faith in the principle is as strong as ever, stronger if possible.”
Movements for Land Reform
Land reform offered another means of improving the plight of working-class Americans. The promise of abundant
land had lured millions across the Atlantic. It still beckoned in the 1840s and 1850s. The federal government owned
huge tracts of unimproved soil in the West, but most was given in subsidy to private railroad companies or sold in
large tracts on the open market. Big land companies, banks, and wealthy individual speculators bought up enormous
quantities of public land. By 1860, speculators owned over twenty million acres in Illinois and Iowa alone—nearly a
quarter of the land in those states. They then jacked up prices and resold the land in smaller plots to homesteaders.
Those who could not afford land on these terms became laborers or tenants of large landowners. Those who did buy
their own farms frequently went into debt to do so. Later, unable to meet their payments, many lost both their
homesteads and their life savings.
Reformers protested these government land policies, demanding that public lands be distributed to the needy, which
would slow the growth of wage labor and tenancy. The most energetic land reformer in the 1830s and 1840s was
George Henry Evans, a Welsh-born printer and a leader of the Workingmen’s Party. Evans insisted, “If any man has a
rightto live, he has a right to land enough for his subsistence. Deprive anyone of these rights, and you place him at the
mercy of those who possess them.” Public land must be made available free of charge to those who would actually
settle and till it.
“The Money-power must be superseded by the Man-power”:
Workers’ Cooperatives
In 1845, the Boston Mechanics’ and Laborers’ Association founded a cooperative society. A committee of
that association drafted the statement excerpted below to explain the purpose and methods of
cooperation.
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Show narrative text
The National Trades Union (NTU), which was organized as a labor union in 1834, also linked “the interests and
independence of the laboring class” to the land question. Its members believed that if “public lands were left open to
actual settlers,” surplus workers would be “drained off” from the cities into agriculture, relieving unemployment and
job competition. The Massachusetts labor newspaper Voice of Industry, warmly endorsed demands for “free soil,” as
did Lynn’s shoe workers. As one shoemaker demanded, “Where shall we go but on to the land? Deprive us of this and
you reduce us to the condition of the serfs of Europe.” Many German immigrants agreed, hoping that wider access to
land would lessen job competition and thus undermine nativism.
Women Reformers Seek Rights for Themselves
Women were active in many of the reform and radical movements of the 1830s and 1840s. In this period, most women
lacked the right to keep their wages, retain custody over their children, or protect their bodies from assault. Free
black and immigrant women were especially limited in their occupational options, yet many had to support their
families and face harassment and assaults by white employers. Although few of these women joined the formal
women’s rights movement in this period, many recognized the need for wider opportunities and collective action.
In 1825, New York seamstresses had organized the first all-woman’s strike in the United States. By 1831, striking
tailoress Sarah Monroe claimed, “It needs no small courage from us . . . to come before the public in the defence of our
own rights, but . . . if it is unfashionable for the men to bear oppression in silence, why it not also become
unfashionable with the women?” Lowell mill girls organized themselves for better wages and working conditions
throughout the 1830s and 1840s. By 1845 members of the Ladies Industrial Association in New York City who sought
similar goals declared, “The boon we ask is founded upon RIGHT alone.” For these women, the most important issues
involved rights to good jobs and fair wages.
Middle-class women did not expect to work for wages, and they generally viewed their lives as superior to those of the
poor and working class. Few recognized or supported these women’s claims for rights of their own. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, one of the founders of the women’s rights movement in the United States, did claim that the condition of
Irish women in her hometown of Seneca Falls, New York, helped inspire her interest in the cause. Yet, she viewed her
Irish neighbors as passive victims of male domination, expressing both concern and condescension for their plight:
Alas! Alas! who can measure the mountains of sorrow and suffering endured in unwelcome motherhood in the
abodes of ignorance, poverty, and vice, where terror-stricken women and children are the victims of strong
men frenzied with passion and intoxicating drink?
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“The Amazonian Convention” The proceedings of a women’s rights meeting were disrupted by hecklers in an 1859
cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly.
J. M’Nevin, Harper’s Weekly, June 11, 1859—American Social History Project.
Most woman’s rights advocates in the 1840s and 1850s were prompted to analyze the position of women in society
because of their involvement in other social causes, most notably the abolition of slavery. As abolitionist Angelina
Grimké noted, “The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own” rights. It
was members of the Society of Friends, known as Quakers, who provided the core of the movement for women’s
rights in the mid-nineteenth century. Led by Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia, Mary Ann McClintock of Waterloo, New
York, and Amy Post of Rochester, these women claimed a decade of experience as advocates of abolition, Indian
rights, land reform, and other causes. The campaign for equality of the sexes was important as part of this larger
effort to achieve racial and economic justice.
Four Quaker activists joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton in organizing the first women’s rights convention in the United
States, held in July 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. Attended by some two to three hundred people, the convention
celebrated the achievements of women past and present, but noted the many burdens placed upon them on account
of their sex. One hundred participants signed a manifesto modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring “all
men and women are created equal.” Demands for greater social and economic rights for American women had been
voiced before this. But only now did an organized movement arise, led by women and dedicated to winning for women
a wider sphere and equal rights. For a few leaders, including Stanton, the most crucial demand to assure women’s
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first-class citizenship was the right to vote. Supported by Frederick Douglass, who was deeply concerned with votes
for free blacks, the suffrage resolution passed, although not unanimously as the other resolutions did.
“Repeated Injuries and Usurpations”: The Seneca Falls
Convention
The resolutions passed at the first women’s rights convention, at Seneca Falls in 1848, parts of which are
presented below, demanded that women be given their full political and civil rights as citizens of the
United States.
Show narrative text
For most women’s rights advocates, however, an enlarged sphere of action for women in the home, the church,
education, and work was as important as political rights. For many women, equal education was considered the most
important right. Individuals like Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States to receive an M.D. degree,
from Geneva Medical College in central New York in 1849, showed what women could do if given the chance. Many
women with far fewer opportunities than Blackwell, including immigrant, African-American, and working-class
women, recognized the value of greater access to education, decent wages, and legal rights. A few woman’s rights
advocates recognized these connections and joined their working-class sisters in forming Working Women’s Protective
Unions. Most also remained ardent abolitionists.
Abolitionists Fight Slavery and Each Other
For many reform-minded women and men, the eradication of slavery was the most important movement of the day.
Led by advocates of immediate emancipation such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Abby Kelley,
radical abolitionists argued that other forms of bondage—wage slavery and prostitution, for instance—paled in
comparison with the millions held in servitude by southern planters. Seeking to create a movement that reflected
democratic and egalitarian ideals, radical abolitionists demanded that antislavery groups, including the American
Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), be open to women as well as to men and to African Americans as well as to whites.
The commitment of radical abolitionists to principles of both racial and sexual equality ensured that some who
agreed with the abolition of slavery would disagree over the means to achieve emancipation. By the late 1830s and
1840s the result was factionalism and infighting among abolitionists. But such disagreements also multiplied the
number and range of antislavery movements, forcing more and more of those who lived in the free-labor North to
confront their complicity with slavery in the South.
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“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” This 1837 engraving was a variation on the standard American abolitionist
symbol of the supplicant male slave. The symbol, accompanied by the motto “Am I not a man and a brother?,” was
adopted from the seal of the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery, created by the English abolitionist and
potter Josiah Wedgwood in 1787.
George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women (1837)—Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
In 1837, tensions among anti-slavery advocates mounted in response to a controversial lecture tour by Sarah and
Angelina Grimké. Southern-born daughters of a slaveholder, the Grimkés rejected the values of their family and
re…

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