Free Labor and Slavery, 1800-1830

By Sean Griffin, Ph.D

Independent Scholar

I. Introduction

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of economic, technological, and social changes began to transform the early United States. Contrary to the expectations of many in the Founding Era, these changes did not bring about the rapid demise of slavery, nor did they transform a majority of Americans into self-sufficient, landowning farmers—the “yeoman republic” envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and others. Rather, they accelerated the sectional differences that had characterized the North and South since the colonial period. Between 1800-1830, two systems of labor expanded together: enslaved labor in the South and wage labor in the North. Southern states became increasingly dependent on slavery. Northern states gradually emancipated the enslaved, and increasingly relied on wage labor. Many called this “free labor,” but the exact meaning of the term was not clear. Workers’ responses to these developments played a pivotal role in shaping the contested meaning of “free labor,” as well as driving the conflict that led to the Civil War, and helping to define the issues that would continue to be debated in the post-Civil War economy and society of the United States.

The U.S. in 1800 remained an overwhelmingly rural, agrarian society. Outside of the Eastern seacoast cities and the plantation regions of the South, most Americans, both North and South, lived and worked on small family farms, consuming most of what they produced and selling the excess in local markets. Rural artisans manufactured tools, wagons, and barrels, purchasing what they could not produce locally; while farm women performed an array of domestic labor while contributing to household production, occasionally taking on “outwork,” (working in their homes to weave cloth or finish other raw materials supplied by local manufacturers). In the cities, urban artisans worked in or near their homes as independent proprietors or in traditional, paternalistic arrangements as journeymen and apprentices. Only a minority of people worked for wages, as employees of someone else (sailors, who made up the largest group of wage earners in this period, were an important exception).[1]

This changed markedly after the War of 1812. New transportation and communication technologies enabled producers and consumers to reach distant markets. Eastern merchants redirected oceangoing trade activity into domestic manufacturing. The “Cotton Revolution” deepened slavery’s hold in the southern states. As gradual emancipation took hold in the northern states, paternalistic employment relationships like indentured servitude and apprenticeship went into simultaneous decline. The payment of wages for work gradually replaced these older arrangements, and by the Civil War, a majority of northerners worked as the employees of others for wages.[2]  

Many northerners were enthusiastic about this new system, which they called “free labor”—a subjective term that was used to describe a wide variety of non-slave, contract-based, labor arrangements. Others questioned whether a system in which the conditions, hours, and pay were subject to the whims of employers, who enjoyed significant economic advantages as well as the backing of the law, was truly free. The antebellum conflict over “free labor,” therefore, was not simply a struggle between free labor and slavery. Rather, it entailed a struggle to define the very meaning of the relationship between work and freedom, one that would reverberate far into the post-Civil War period.[3]

II. The Spread of Slavery, Wage Labor, and “Free Labor” Ideology

As free wage labor spread in the North, enslaved labor grew in the South. The rise of the “Cotton Kingdom” came from access to new and fertile lands in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and (after 1803), the southwestern portion of the Louisiana Purchase, together with the displacement of Indigenous populations, and an increase in demand from the cotton mills of industrializing Great Britain. By 1831, the cotton crop grown in the United States had mushroomed to over 350 million bales, compared to some 40 million in 1800, a more than eightfold increase.[4] Although the importation of enslaved workers from Africa was banned in 1808, more than 1 million enslaved people were transported overland or via the coastwise trade to the new cotton states between 1800 and 1860; the enslaved population grew from approximately one million to four million. Slaveholders, meanwhile, increasingly relied on new methods of “scientific” management, including coercive violence, to manage their enslaved workforces.[5]

Enslaved people resisted these developments in a number of ways, from running away to slowing down the pace of work; from breaking tools and committing acts of sabotage, to outright rebellion. Other enslaved workers found ways of mitigating some of the harshest aspects of slavery. During the period of gradual emancipation in states like New York and Pennsylvania, enslaved people sometimes successfully negotiated with enslavers to gain freedom for themselves or family members before the terms of emancipation acts came into effect, or to have their bonded status changed to that of an indenture.[6] In the Chesapeake region, where tobacco plantations were in decline, enslaved people were sometimes “hired out” to other plantations, or to work in mills, artisans’ shops, or on wharfs. In other parts of the South, such as the Lowcountry and Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, the use of the “task system” meant that enslaved people had some control of their time after designated tasks were finished. They used this time to cultivate garden plots, hunt, fish, or perform other work for themselves and their families. Regardless of the circumstances, enslaved people developed a consciousness of themselves as workers with rights to be defended, however minimal or precarious.[7]

While many white northerners disapproved of slavery and believed it to be contrary to the interests of free labor, most were deeply invested in ideas of white superiority and anti-black racism. The northern economy was intertwined with the slave economy of the South in many ways, from the New York shippers and merchants who transported slave-grown cotton across the Atlantic, to New England textile workers who wove cotton and wool into cheap “negro cloth” to clothe enslaved people, to the shoemakers in Philadelphia and Lynn, Massachusetts who made cheap shoes and boots for the southern trade.[8] Free blacks in the North were barred from many skilled trades. Meanwhile, the arrival of millions of immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Britain and elsewhere led to further competition for jobs and the displacement of African Americans from many lower-skilled jobs as dockworkers and laborers. In the South, white workers protested against the use of enslaved artisans in cities like Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, arguing that the reliance on enslaved labor undercut their wages and degraded their status as free white laborers.[9]

Despite the connections between the northern economy and the slave labor system of the South, the defense of “free labor” soon became a rallying cry for many northerners, who viewed their social system as more egalitarian, more efficient, and morally superior to slavery. Left to the invisible hand of market forces, its proponents believed, free labor would not only outperform and overwhelm slavery in western territories where the conflict between the two systems was becoming increasingly acute; but labor markets would naturally arrive at an equilibrium between the needs of employers and the pool of available workers, thus setting wages at a fair price and ensuring social harmony.[10]

Many workers benefitted from the new wage relationships. Some master artisans successfully transformed themselves into manufacturing entrepreneurs, and began to employ others in turn. But the need for expensive investments in new technologies and the increasing reliance on the division of labor—dividing the stages of production into relatively simple, repetitive tasks—cut a majority of artisans off from traditional paths to economic independence. Many were caught in a process of “deskilling,” which forced down their wages or replaced skilled tradesmen with cheaper, less skilled labor. In New England textile manufacturing centers like Lowell, Waltham, and Pawtucket, factory labor was supplied largely by women—initially young, unmarried farm women from the surrounding countryside, and later by Irish immigrants. The fact that many of these factory “operatives” were women, children, and/or immigrants increased anxieties surrounding traditional gender roles and contributed to anti-immigrant backlash. Although many operatives, like the New England farm women, worked in factories only seasonally or for a few years before marriage, others became trapped in a permanent status as propertyless wage laborers, with only their labor power to sell.[11]       

Faced with such challenges, northern workers began to develop an alternative understanding of “free labor,” based on their commitment to republican ideals of economic and political independence. Nearly all believed that they, as the producers of the nation’s wealth and economic success, were entitled to a fair share of what they called “the fruits of their labor.”[12] For many, the power of concentrated capital, controlled by bankers, corporations, manufacturers, and other “capitalists,” far outweighed the ability of workers to obtain a “just price” for their labor. Some labor radicals denounced “the wages system” altogether as an inegalitarian form of dependence that had no place in a republican system of government. In contrast to those who defended the North as a land of opportunity, these working-class reformers rejected the notion that northern “free labor” was truly free, and described their condition as a form of “white slavery” or “wage slavery.” This use of “wage slavery” borrowed from the moral condemnations of the antislavery movement, insisting that the question of “free labor” was not defined by chattel status, but by the degree of dependence on the owners of capital.[13]

III. Early Strikes and Labor Organizations

Long before wage labor became the dominant form of work in the North, artisans and journeymen had begun to form trade unions and associations, early expressions of the idea that “free labor” meant organizing to protect workers’ freedom. By 1794, for example, journeymen cordwainers had organized into a separate association known as the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers in order to protect themselves against declining prices and “scabs” willing to work for lower wages. But master cordwainers’ increasing reliance on so-called “exports” to the South—where enslaved workers formed a large market for cheap shoes, boots, and brogans—continued to drive wages down, resulting in the Cordwainers strike of 1805, sometimes considered to be the first strike in the United States. The strike ended with the court decision Commonwealth v. Pullis (1806), which found the striking workers guilty of illegal combination and “conspiracy” thus denying them the right to organize collectively.[14]

Subsequent strikes by shoemakers in New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere were met with similar results, and for all intents and purposes both strikes and unions remained illegal before the Commonwealth v. Hunt decision in the Massachusetts in 1842 began to slowly change legal understandings of permissible labor actions. Other strikes—by textile workers in Pawtucket in 1824, women garment workers in New York and house carpenters in Boston in 1825, and Philadelphia tailors in 1827—met with varying degrees of success or failure.[15] Although both trade unions and strikes would remain permanent features of the labor movement, workers would increasingly look towards other solutions in the decades before the Civil War. The failure of most strikes and adverse legal rulings led an increasing number of workers to see the wage system itself as the problem.

IV. Cooperation and Communitarianism

Some workers began experimenting with alternatives to the emerging employer-wage labor system. In 1827, a self-described “mechanic” (the generic term for a manual worker) wrote to the Philadelphia Mechanics’ Free Press to advocate that workers pool their resources in order to form small, self-sustaining communities in the rural hinterlands. By working cooperatively, they might escape the competition and poverty of cities and regain their lost sense of republican independence.[16] The anonymous mechanic expressed an important current of early labor reform thought. In late 1825, the British industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen arrived in New York City, where he was greeted by members of the New York Society for Promoting Communities, an organization made up largely of master artisans and journeymen. Owen’s A New View of Society spelled out his program for a “new moral world” based on cooperative labor organized into self-sufficient “villages of union.” A few years earlier, the New York Society for Promoting Communities had commissioned physician Cornelius Blatchly to write An Essay on Common Wealths, which called for the organization of “pure and perfect communities” of mechanics and farmers.[17] In the decade that followed, groups of workers organized intentional communities in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; Haverstraw, New York; and Greene County, Ohio, among dozens of other locations.[18]

The best known of these remains the experimental community founded by Owen at New Harmony, Indiana, on frontier land purchased from a German religious sect. During New Harmony’s short existence, the community of around 800—which included carpenters, bricklayers, stonecutters, tailors, shoemakers, butchers, blacksmiths, and farm laborers—boasted a hat manufactory, a ropewalk, a dyeworks, and a wool- and cotton-spinning operation. Although New Harmony attracted significant numbers of skilled workers (as well as some curiosity-seekers and hangers-on), it did not attract them in the numbers necessary to sustain itself as a self-sufficient community. Moreover, Owen never seemed to clarify a coherent scheme for cooperative labor. Although he sometimes spoke of abolishing private property—an idea which, together with his attacks on traditional marriage and organized religion, soon alienated his more elite supporters—community of property was never instituted. By 1827, the experiment at New Harmony had all but ended.[19]

Yet, the idea of establishing cooperative communities as an alternative to competitive wage labor lived on. A splinter group of English immigrant farmers at New Harmony organized a separate, longer-lasting community, which in turn gave rise to a joint-stock cooperative for farm workers. Back in England, Owen became a strong supporter of trades unions and workers’ cooperatives, eventually garnering a reputation as the forefather of British socialism. His son, Robert Dale Owen, remained in the United States and—after collaborating with another British-born labor activist, Frances Wright, in the Working Men’s Party movement—became an influential U.S. Senator during Reconstruction. The communitarian impulse would undergo a resurgence in the 1840s, with dozens of communities organized along principles ranging from Josiah Warren’s proto-anarchism to the utopian ideas of French social thinker Charles Fourier.  These experiments might seem to be failures, but they show that workers thought about how to build alternative labor systems organized around cooperation rather than competition, and thought deeply about the relationship between property rights and workers’ rights.

V. The Working Men’s Parties

Other workers turned to political and third-party approaches. After the failure of a carpenters’ strike in 1827, a group of Philadelphia painters, glaziers, shoemakers, and other tradesmen joined forces to found the Mechanics’ Union of Trade Associations (MUTA), the first organization in the United States to represent multiple trades in a single union (what would later be called “industrial” unionism, as opposed to “craft” unionism). In May 1828, MUTA began to pass resolutions to nominate candidates “to represent the interests of the working classes” in the upcoming November elections. Thus, the nation’s first labor-based political party, the Working Men’s Party of Philadelphia, was born.[20]

The Working Men’s Party movement soon spread to more than sixty large and small towns and cities across the North and border South, including such unlikely locales as Woodstock, Vermont and Zanesville, Ohio. But by far the best-known Working Men’s parties were those based in Philadelphia and New York City. The New York Working Men were organized some two years after their Philadelphia counterparts. Prominent participants included George Henry Evans (an English immigrant, and editor of the Working Man’s Advocate), Thomas Skidmore (a machinist and author of The Right of Man to Property!), Robert Dale Owen, and Frances Wright (both described above). Like the Working Men’s organizations elsewhere, the New York Working Men fielded independent candidates for local and national office.[21] Candidates supported reforms such as mechanics’ lien laws, free public education, a ten-hour working day; and the abolition of imprisonment for debt, prison labor, and state-licensed monopolies. Working Men’s organizations in smaller locales often reflected local concerns, and were not merely auxiliaries to larger party organizations in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.[22]

Although the Working Men’s Party movement has often been depicted as an expression of “Jacksonian Democracy,” in reality the Working Men’s candidates were intended to serve as independent alternatives to Jackson’s faction of the Democratic-Republicans (soon to be known simply as Democrats). A few figures, like Philadelphia Working Men’s leader Stephen Simpson, had roots in the pro-Adams or National Republican faction. Others were “most uncommon Jacksonians,” aligning with the Democrats on some issues (like opposition to the National Bank), while challenging them on others. After Jackson’s reelection in 1832, the Working Men’s parties died out as their leaders and electorate were subsumed into the Democratic coalition. But their legacy remained in opposition factions like the Equal Rights Democrats (known as the “Loco Focos”), who challenged the increasingly pro-business national party with a strict and principled resistance to the National Bank, paper money, and any form of “monopoly”—which in antebellum America referred to the granting of an exclusive state or national contract to an individual or corporation.[23]

This “anti-monopoly” stance would remain the animating spirit of the labor movement throughout the nineteenth century.  During the decades surrounding the Civil War and beyond, workers would continue to challenge dominant, liberal and laissez-faire understandings of “free labor,” positing instead the creation of a “cooperative commonwealth,” in which workers would enjoy a greater degree of equality and autonomy, and achieve the independence they believed promised to them by the founding of the American republic.[24]

     [1] Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

     [2] Stanley Lebergott, “Labor Force and Employment, 1800–1960,” in Dorothy S. Brady, ed., Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1966): 117–204.

       [3] Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350—1870 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

     [4] U.S. Census, “Introduction, Manufactures of the United States in 1860,” (U.S. Government, 1860), xv; “Table 4.1: Cotton Production in the United States,” in Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 114.

     [5] Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), 88–99.

     [6] Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810 (Athens, Ga.: 1991).

     [7] Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 156–57, 311–18; David Roediger, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (Verso, 2014).

     [8] Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2024).

     [9] Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 99–103; Michelle Gillespie, Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

     [10] Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995); Andrew Shankman, ” “Neither Infinite Wretchedness nor Positive Good: Matthew Carey and Henry Clay on Political Economy and Slavery During the Long 1820s,” in John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 247–267.

     [11] Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989); 15–36; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

     [12] Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 61–103; Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

     [13] Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980), 57–76; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Sean Griffin, The Root and the Branch: Working-Class Reform and Antislavery, 1790–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

     [14] Commons, Documentary History vol. III, 19–39, 59–250; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 65–81; Patrick Grubbs, “Cordwainers Trial of 1806,” The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/cordwainers-trial-of-1806/. 

     [15] John R. Commons, ed., History of Labour in the United States Vol. I (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), 156–65.

     [16] “To Industrious Mechanics who possess small Available Capitals,” Mechanics’ Free Press, May 29, 1829 (see also May 22, June 5, June 12, 1830).

     [17] “Constitution of the Valley Forge Community,” (Appendix to John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness, Philadelphia, 1826); Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 159–60.

     [18] Gregory Claeys, ed., A New View of Society and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 1–10; Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663–1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 55, 100, 202-15, 223–26; Appendix, 279–80.

     [19] Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 162–63; T.M. Bosson, “View of New Harmony,” New Harmony Gazette, I, (22 October, 1825).

     [20] Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 75–76; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 282–286, 357–358, 794.

     [21] Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 192–208.

     [22] Joshua Greenberg, “Radicalism in the Age of Jackson,” in Sean Patrick Adams, ed., A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 412–432.

       [23] Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press).

     [24] Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians; David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).