This Day in Labor History: June 3, 1824

On June 3, 1824, the Pawtucket, Rhode Island factory strike, one of the first strikes in American history, ended. This is a great entry point into the difficulties of labor in early Industrial America and the ways in which workers began to stand up for their rights as human beings.

The Industrial Revolution in the U.S. started in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the 1790s. That was with Samuel Slater building the first modern mill in this country. You can visit it today and it is a worthy visit. Conditions in these early factories were however, pretty terrible. Slater himself had started working as a child in the mills of England and so he saw nothing wrong with child labor or long hours. People in this era were used to working long hours on the farm, sure. But that was a very different thing than long hours in the mills. On the farm, you worked outside and you did a variety of different tasks. In the mills, you labored in these closed and often pretty dark spaces that could get very hot and very loud. It was a simply a different category of labor. The system Slater brought to the U.S. expanded pretty quickly, using a surplus of southern cotton that came shortly after the invention of the cotton gin, and existed on sites where you could harness water power through the Northeast and down into New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

It’s not surprising then that workers would become unhappy with the conditions of their lives. This was a major worry for a lot of Americans, who saw the factory towns of England such as Manchester and were horrified at the poverty, crime, and general degradation. This led some more forward-thinking capitalists to create model towns, most notably at Lowell, Massachusetts but there were others as well, such as in Peacedale, Rhode Island, that intended to provide quality living conditions and educational opportunities for young women while they worked in the factories for a few years before presumably getting married to respectable American men.

But for the most part, owners couldn’t care less about their workers. They were rising men of capital, employees didn’t have that capital, and there was little to no sense that employers should have some responsibilities to their workers. Moreover, the global economy was exceedingly prone to rapid fluctuations, which was a problem through the 19th century. The textile industry had already suffered serious problems in 1817. Then, in 1824, a second depression came. Employers knew of one way to maintain profits, which was to take it out of workers.

So that spring, the mill employers of Pawtucket decided to take drastic actions to increase their profits on the backs of their workers. First, they decided to add an extra hour to the work day. Second, they reduced the time workers got for lunch. Third, they reduced the overall wages per day by 25 percent.

Now, in 1824, the worker of the factory world was not quite yet a modern proletariat. Mostly, these were still Anglo-Saxon women with some cultural capital and some expectations of being treated decently. In fact, the workforce was changing in these years, moving away from children bonded to the factories as apprentices and basically worked to death or close to it and moving toward adult (or young adult) white women. We know that kids ran away from these apprentices all the time, so we can consider that a form of resistance. But these women had more ability to make collective claims and act upon them as one. So on May 26, 102 weavers walked off the job. They had concrete demands–they wanted the work to go back to how it was before the changes.

On June 1, someone tried to burn one of the mills down. No one knows who and it very well may not have been a worker. The factories were not popular with wide swaths of the public, who saw them running roughshod over their traditions (very much including fishing, which the dams stopped), creating noise, killing workers, and just generally being a blight upon life. It could have been a worker though. We simply can’t know and probably never will.

On June 3, the strike ended. There’s no real story here we can know. In fact, we lack any primary sources from the women involved in this strike. Later, in Lowell, women involved in strikes would write about their experiences, but everything we know about this 1824 action either came from company records or the newspapers. So obviously we are missing parts of the story here, but that’s how it goes for things from this era. It does seem that there was some sort of compromise to end the strike, but we don’t really know the details.

What we do know is that the Pawtucket factory owners were not happy with the strike, or the attempt to burn down their mills. In the aftermath, they lobbied the town government for a police force that would guard the town at night. Police as we know it today didn’t really exist at this time, so asking for policing was something of a novel act. However, property would soon invest in a variety of police forces, whether private or municipal or state, in order to protect their factories and bust strikes. So we can see this act as a starting point to that, though there were no doubt multiple starting points.

Also, the Pawtucket politician George Jenkes was seriously freaked out here. He wrote in his journal:  

“I have just returned from one of the moste gloomy assemblage of people I have ever witnessed, from the street form the Pawtucket Bank across the bridge to Josiah Mill’s shop is literally filled with Men Women and Children — making a mob of very daring aspect, insulting the managers of cotton mills in every shape — pulling and hauling — screaming and shouting thro the streets.”

One thing we also know is that this strike led to more strikes in Pawtucket. For example, mechanics were supportive of the strike and just a couple of days after the weavers’ strike ended, they engaged in their own strike.

I borrowed from the work of my former student Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, particularly his article on this strike in Jacobin, to write this post. I was quite pleased to have Joey in my labor history graduate seminar a few years ago and he went on to do a great thesis on the real origin of the Gaspee burning. The Gaspee was a British ship that ran aground in Narragansett Bay in 1772 and Rhode Islanders went out there to burn it. Basically, it’s classic Rhode Island–our version of the Boston Tea Party that we claim was earlier and also it was trashier. What Joey shows is that this action was really about pro-slave trade forces acting to protect their ability to engage in buying and selling humans. I didn’t work with him on the thesis, as we have people much more knowledgable about both early America and Rhode Island that I am, but by all accounts it was excellent. Joey also is a fairly well known musician. Among other things, there’s the La Neve act and he also played guitar in Downtown Boys. Always good to learn from your students.

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