216 labor unions and labor movements in the United States The period from the late 1820s to the mid-1830s saw a flourishing of workers’ associations, trade unions, and workers’ political parties in major cities of the Northeast, symbolized by the formation of the General Trades’ Union of New York in 1833 Inspired by 18thcentury republicanism, evangelical Christianity, broader reformist impulses, and local traditions of autonomy, one of the major goals of these early organizing efforts was to establish a 10-hour workday Most such efforts failed, as by law and custom employers enjoyed the right to dictate the terms of labor, including the length of the workday The issue came to a head in 1835, which saw the first general strike in U.S history, as carpenters, millhands, stonecutters, hatters, shoemakers, horseshoers, and members of many other trades, male and female, walked off the job, set up picket lines, staged street demonstrations, and assembled in town halls and large open-air gatherings in cities and towns across the Northeast The spate of organizing, striking, and picketing continued into 1836, a year that saw more than a dozen new unions established in major U.S cities EARLY ORGANIZATION The surge of labor activism came to an abrupt halt with the panic of 1837, which sent the national economy into a nosedive and threw thousands out of work The economic depression lasted seven years, severely weakening the bargaining power of workers’ organizations Meanwhile major changes were transforming the face of the nation Waves of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and elsewhere in Europe poured into the major cities of the eastern seaboard in the 1840s and 1850s, many heading west with the promise of ample cheap land The transportation revolution went hand-in-hand with the market revolution, as canals, roads, and railroads made geographic mobility a characteristic feature of the young republic’s burgeoning population Ethnic, racial, and religious divisions compounded the difficulties of forging viable workers’ political parties or labor unions, as did a surge in antiimmigrant (or nativist) sentiment among the American-born In the late 1840s, exemplifying the reformist impulse sweeping through much of the country in the preceding two decades, a resurgent labor movement coalesced under the banner of national reform, brainchild of former trade unionist George Henry Evans, who built on Jeffersonian agrarianism to envision a nation of small farmers supplied with land by the federal gov- ernment During the same period, industrial congresses formed in many of the nation’s major cities, exemplified by the National Typographical Union, formed in 1852 and arguably the country’s first national trade union A spurt of organizing in the early 1850s created national unions of upholsterers, railroad engineers, blacksmiths, and other tradesmen The momentum proved hard to sustain, however Economic downturns in 1854 and 1857, combined with westward expansion and torrents of new immigrants—2 million in the 1850s alone— intensified nativist sentiments, fragmenting working people by ethnicity, religion, and politics, as well as by region Still, these years saw major organizing efforts and several important strikes, most notably the Great Strike of 1860, sparked by shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, which spread throughout much of the Northeast, in which some 20,000 workers participated and women played a major role The American Civil War transformed the nation’s economy in important ways and, with it, the relations among labor, capital, and the state The state got bigger; big business got bigger; and organized labor struggled to keep up At one level, the war created the nation’s first military-industrial complex Wartime production surged, as ever-larger factories, North and South, churned out staggering quantities of munitions, uniforms, and sundry other items consumed in the conflict Federal government spending more than quadrupled from 1860 to 1870 (from $72 to $329 million), the vast bulk due to deficit spending, via bonds, to finance the war, expanding the stock market and providing a tremendous boost to the nation’s banks and finance capital Dramatically expanding the size and scope of the federal government, the war also expanded and integrated the nation’s markets and its transport and communication infrastructure In the North, full employment strengthened workers’ bargaining power and heightened worker militancy, leading to a surge in labor organizing, with some 300 unions representing 61 trades founded during the war By war’s end, some 200,000 workers belonged to hundreds of trade unions, some of them national and many others aspiring to be ORGANIZED LABOR Organized labor came of age during the Second Industrial Revolution after the Civil War, which reached its height from the 1870s to the 1890s, fueled by large concentrations of finance capital, rapidly expanding markets, a host of technological innovations, and torrents of immigrants pouring in from Europe and Canada and, in the West, from Asia The growth of major industries