Cobbs-Hoffman Elizabeth, Blum Edward J., Gjerde Jon. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3 edition (ENG)
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I cannot track completely Truth’s antislavery and women’s rights appear-
ances, for reporters did not invariably consider her worth identifying by name,
or even mentioning at all. She doubtless attended and addressed many meetings
without notice between 1845 and 1850. I do know for certain that she attended
and addressed a large women’s rights meeting in Worcester. Massachusetts, in
1850—the first such meeting of national scope in the United States. This
Worcester meeting was an immediate successor of the pioneering Seneca Falls,
New York, women’s convention of 1848 organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Lucretia Mott, and others—including the Rochester abolitionist Amy Post, who
would play so large a role in Truth’s later life.
Women had been publicly vindicating their rights as women, as workers,
and as blacks in the United States since the Scotswoman Frances Wright lectured
in New York City in the late 1820s and the African American Maria Stewart
spoke in Boston in the early 1830s. But women as speakers before mixed, or
“promiscuous” audiences of women and men were rare, even when the subject
was evangelical and the tradition—as in the case of women itinerant preachers—
centuries older. Women lecturers like Angelina Grimké and Abby Kelley caused
a sensation when they joined the anti-slavery circuit in the 1830s, since critics
opposed women’s right to advocate anything in public.
By 1840, the issue of women as leaders in abolitionism had split the American
movement, with Garrisonians like Frederick Douglass and Abby Kelly defending
women’s rights, and less radical men, especially Arthur and Lewis Tappan, leav-
ing the American Anti-slavery Society on this and other grounds. The Tappans’
unwillingness to mix antislavery with other reforms, such as women’s rights, is
probably the main reason they do not appear in the Narative of Sojourner Truth.
The rival society set up by the Tappans and their supporters withered, while the
Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society flourished. After 1840, in the fashion
of excommunicators, the Garrisonians pretended that the Tappans did not exist,
despite their crucial early role in abolitionism.
Garrison firmly supported the 1850 women’s rights meeting in Worcester
and may have suggested that Douglass and Truth speak. According to a newspa-
per report, Truth “uttered some truths that told well,” although her skin was
dark and her outward appearance “uncomely.” Truth spoke primarily as a
preacher: “She said Woman set the world wrong by eating the forbidden fruit,
and now she was going to set it right. She said Goodness never had any begin-
ning; it was from everlasting, and could never die. But Evil had a beginning, and
must have an end. She expressed great reverence for God, and faith that he will
bring about his own purposes and plans.”
In her concluding remarks, Lucretia Mott, a leader of the convention, men-
tioned Truth by name as “the poor woman who had grown up under the curse
of Slavery,” and repeated Truth’s formulation of the finite nature of evil and the
everlasting quality of good. Truth’s other early reported antislavery speech in
1850, at the annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society in Provi-
dence, in November, was also vague on antislavery politics. While the men,
Frederick Douglass, Charles C. Burleigh, and Charles Lenox Remond, damned the
Fugitive Slave Act for hours and demanded Garrison’s version of disunion—“No
REFORM AND THE GREAT AWAKENING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 323
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union with slaveholders!”—Truth was reported as brief and hesitant: “she had
been a slave, and was not now entirely free. She did not know anything about
politics—could not read the newspaper—but thanked God that the law was
made—that the worst had come to worst; but the best must come to best.”
TRUTH’S first tour on the antislavery and women’s rights circuit in the winter of
1851 came at Garrison’s behest. He invited her to accompany him and his dear
friend, the radical British Member of Parliament George Thompson, on a trip into
western New York….
The Fourth of July 1854 found Truth back before white audiences, speaking
at an Independence Day celebration in Framingham, Massachusetts. She spoke
after a white abolitionist from Virginia described his ordeal in jail. This experi-
ence, he said, helped him appreciate the sufferings of blacks. Truth agreed.
“White folks should sometimes feel the prick,” she said, eliciting “laughter and
cheers.” Despite such merriment, her message, as recorded by the secretary of the
meeting (her printer, George Brown Yerrinton), was severe and anguished:
God would yet execute his judgments upon the white people for their
oppression and cruelty. She had often asked white people why God
should have more mercy on Anglo-Saxons than on Africans, but they
had never given her any answer; the reason was, they [white people]
hadn’t got it to give. (Laughter.) Why did the white people hate the
blacks? Were they [white people] not as good as they were brought up?
They [black people] were a great deal better than the white people had
brought them up. (Cheers.) The white people owed the colored race a
big debt, and if they paid it all back, they wouldn’t have anything left
for seed. (Laughter.) All they could do was to repent, and have the debt
forgiven them.
Abolitionists were fond of implicating orthodox Christianity in the moral
economy of slavery. The regular ministry and conventional churches tolerated
slavers and slavery, they said, and Truth picked up this theme. The proceeds of
the sale of slave children, she says, paid for the training of ministers of the
gospel….
According to [Harriet Beecher] Stowe … Frederick Douglass once spoke
emphatically at a meeting in Boston’s Faneuil Hall of his lost faith that black
Americans would ever gain justice from white Americans. Douglass had con-
cluded that blacks must seize their freedom by force of arms: “It must come to
blood; they must fight for themselves, and redeem themselves, or it would never
be done.”
Truth, sitting in the front row—so Stowe says—rejected Douglass’sdesperate
logic:
in the hush of deep feeling, after Douglas[s] sat down, she spoke out in
her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the house.—
“Frederick, is God dead?”
324 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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Then Stowe adds a paragraph whose imagery would reappear time and again as
generation after generation sought to capture Truth’s essence in words:
The effect was perfectly electrical, and thrilled through the whole
house, changing as by a flash the whole feeling of the audience. Not
another word she said or needed to say: it was enough….
“Frederick, is God dead?” made Truth an electrifying presence and a symbol
of Christian faith and forbearance, a talisman of non-violent faith in God’s ability
to right the most heinous of wrongs. When Douglass had come to doubt,
Stowe’s Truth still believed in the power of God and the goodness of white
people. To reinforce Truth’s attachment to whites, Stowe quotes her revelation
when she became a Christian: “‘Dar’s de white folks, that have abused you an’
beat you an’ abused your people.’” Jesus allows Truth to forgive them: “‘Lord,
Lord, I can love even de white folks!’”
Thanks to Stowe and the Atlantic Monthly, “Frederick, is God dead?” became
the dominant symbol for Truth. For three-quarters of a century, the image of
Stowe’s faithful Christian delighted thousands of Americans, while the exasper-
ated, vengeful Truth of the Book of Esther, the blood of Abel, and the taunting
question, do you “wish to suck?” remained more obscure. “Sojourner Truth, the
Libyan Sibyl” spread the gentleness of spiritualism over Truth’s own millennial
conviction that there surely would come a day of racial judgment….
FURTHER READING
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (1994).
Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845
(1998).
Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2007).
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977).
Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (1998).
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991).
Peter P. Hinks, To My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave
Resistance (1996).
Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998).
Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (1994).
Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (2005).
Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers (1995).
Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York,
1790–1865 (1981).
John Wigger, Taking Heaven By Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in
America (2001).
REFORM AND THE GREAT AWAKENING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 325
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CHAPTER 11
Commercial Development
and Immigration in the North
at Midcentury
In the thirty years before the Civil War, society in the northern states was transformed in a
variety of ways. There was a huge migration westward, effectively redistributing the popu-
lation of the nation. Between 1830 and 1860, the white population of the Old Northwest
(the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin) grew from 1.5 million to
nearly 7 million. Agricultural innovations, including Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical
reaper and John Deere’s self-polishing steel plow, enabled the fast and lucrative cultivation
of the Midwest. By 1860, one-quarter of the nation’s population, most of whom toiled on
the land, lived in these northwestern states and they provided much of the voting power for
the new Republican Party of the 1850s. As millions of people moved westward, others
migrated to the cities. By 1860, there were thirty-five cities in the United States with
more than 25,000 inhabitants; New York City had more than one million inhabitants.
Most of these cities were located in the northern states. Many city dwellers labored for wages
in factories or mills. Many of the early workers were young women who left their rural
homes to labor in the factories.
Cloth manufacturing changed radically when a factory in Waltham, Massachusetts,
was built that mechanized all the stages in the production of cloth and brought the whole
process under one roof. The evolution of cloth factories was complemented by innovations in
the use of interchangeable parts that enabled manufacturers to develop complex assembly
plants that produced clocks and guns, among other products. By 1860, nearly 300,000
workers toiled in northern industries, and population densities in the city reached up to 150
people per acre. As time went on, immigrants from Europe replaced many of the young
female workers in the factories and also labored on western farms. Immigration, which was
a mere 150,000 in the 1820s, swelled to over 1.5 million in the 1840s and 2.2 million
in the 1850s. Mainly from the German states or Ireland, these immigrants often lived
in poverty in urban slums and worshipped in Roman Catholic churches. They illustrated
326
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to many Americans the dangers of urbanization, commercialization, and mechanization in
the North.
These vast changes created grave challenges for northern society, especially in its grow-
ing cities. Densely settled neighborhoods became increasingly unhealthy. Workers strove to
organize trade unions that would improve wages and working conditions. But wages often
lagged and workers fell victim to the financial crashes in 1837 and 1857, which increased
unemployment and uncertainty. Some northerners began to fear that they would become
“wage slaves,” people who would never be freed of their need to labor in order to stay alive.
To make matters worse, the cultural differences within the cities created tensions that occa-
sionally exploded in violence. Riots in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and in rural
areas as well, pitted the native born against the immigrant. Immigrants often were scape-
goats, and their allegiance to Roman Catholicism only made them more suspect to citizens
in a largely Protestant nation.
Despite these challenges, many northerners remained optimistic that their world of com-
merce, farming, and manufacturing was the direction in which the United States should head.
In particular, they were certain that their society was superior to the slave society in the South.
As a result, they developed ideologies that explained their predicament and celebrated their
society. Although some northerners feared “wage slavery,” others applauded the economic mo-
bility that workers were offered. Free laborers, so the argument went, could improve their con-
dition through their own hard work and could ultimately become economically independent. As
Abraham Lincoln observed, “The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for
himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” Thesumtotaloffreeindividuals
working to improve themselves created a mobile society and a growing economy. “The desire of
bettering one’scondition,” wrote newspaper editor Horace Greeley, “is the mainspring of
effort.” A key element supporting the system of free labor was the availability of the vast tracts
of land in the West. People could move up as they moved west. By forsaking an urban occu-
pation, so the argument went, they relieved the pressures that built up in the city. The West
was a necessary “safety valve.” It is no coincidence that the Republican Party, a political
organization founded in the 1850s whose membership came almost entirely from the northern
states, would proclaim that it was the party of “Free Labor, Free Soil, and Free Men.”
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
How were economic and geographical mobility central to the experience and
ideologies of northerners? Why would immigrants move to the North if they
experienced oppression there? Why do you think northerners were so sensitive
to terms like wage slavery and white slavery? In what ways did immigration create
a more volatile northern society when it increased dramatically in the decades
after 1830?
DOCUMENTS
Alexis de Tocqueville, in document 1, observes that although early-nineteenth-
century Americans were among the freest and best-educated people in the
COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND IMMIGRATION IN THE NORTH 327
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world, they were unhappy. He attributes this oddity to the desire for mobility
that stems from that very freeness. Document 2 was written by inventor
Samuel F. B. Morse, who argues both that class division are more fluid in the
United States than in Europe and that European immigration might endanger
this fluidity. In document 3, Orestes Brownson offers a scathing critique of the
status of workers in the North in 1840. He goes so far as to suggest that the
plight of these “wage slaves” is worse than that of slaves in the South. In doc-
ument 4, a Swedish immigrant reflects on life in Wisconsin in 1841 and 1842;
he enjoys an independence not available in his homeland. Although he finds
Americans different from his people, he does appreciate the republican form
of government. Document 5 recounts the experiences of a female mill worker
in Massachusetts. In document 6, George Templeton Strong describes in his
diary the impact of European immigrants on New York City. No friend to
immigrants, Strong compares the Irish with the Chinese. In document 7 Con-
gressman James Bowlin recounts the opportunities in the West. He sees them
as the basis for American freedom and argues that they can solve many of the
ills in the urban northeast. The final document is a song from the early 1860s,
“No Irish Need Apply.” In it, the singer details anti-Irish sentiment in the
United States and how Irish Americans should take pride in their ethnic
heritage.
1. Alexis de Tocqueville Marvels
at the Mobile Northern Society, 1831
In certain remote corners of the Old World you may sometimes stumble upon
little places which seem to have been forgotten among the general tumult and
which have stayed still while all around them moves. The inhabitants are mostly
very ignorant and very poor; they take no part in affairs of government, and
often governments oppress them. But yet they seem serene and often have a
jovial disposition.
In America I have seen the freest and best educated of men in circumstances
the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitu-
ally hung on their brow, and they seemed serious and almost sad even in their
pleasures.
The chief reason for this is that the former do not give a moment’s thought
to the ills they endure, whereas the latter never stop thinking of the good things
they have not got.
It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity
and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not
have chosen the shortest route to get it.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II (Boston: Little and J. Brown, 1841), 536–538.
328 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never
die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that come within their reach, as if
expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything
but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.
An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it be-
fore the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming
into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take
up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with
his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment’s relaxation, he
will plunge at once into the whirlpool of politics. Then, if at the end of a year
crammed with work he has a little spare leisure, his restless curiosity goes with
him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States. Thus he will
travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distraction from his happiness.
Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this
futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him.
At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky
men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world;
all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.
The taste for physical pleasures must be regarded as the first cause of this
secret restlessness betrayed by the actions of the Americans, and of the incon-
stancy of which they give daily examples.
A man who has set his heart on nothing but the good things of this world is
always in a hurry, for he has only a limited time in which to find them, get
them, and enjoy them….
When all prerogatives of birth and fortune are abolished, when all profes-
sions are open to all and a man’s own energies may bring him to the top of
any of them, an ambitious man may think it easy to launch on a great career
and feel that he is called to no common destiny. But that is a delusion which
experience quickly corrects. The same equality which allows each man to enter-
tain vast hopes makes each man by himself weak. His power is limited on every
side, though his longings may wander where they will.
Not only are men powerless by themselves, but at every step they find im-
mense obstacles which they had not at first noticed.
They have abolished the troublesome privileges of some of their fellows, but
they come up against the competition of all….
No matter how a people strives for it, all the conditions of life can never be
perfectly equal. Even if, by misfortune, such an absolute dead level were attained,
there would still be inequalities of intelligence which, coming directly from God,
will ever escape the laws of man….
Among democratic peoples men easily obtain a certain equality, but they
will never get the sort of equality they long for. That is a quality which ever
retreats before them without getting quite out of sight, and as it retreats it beck-
ons them on to pursue. Every instant they think they will catch it, and each time
it slips through their fingers. They see it close enough to know its charms, but
they do not get near enough to enjoy it, and they will be dead before they have
fully relished its delights.
COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND IMMIGRATION IN THE NORTH 329
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2. Inventor Samuel F. B. Morse Fears That Immigrants
Will Ruin American Inequality, 1835
What is the proper effect of our democratic republican institutions upon the var-
ious classes into which human society must ever be divided? How do they affect
the condition of the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate? Equality, the
only practicable equality, is their result; not that spurious, visionary equality
which would make a forced community of property, but that equality which
puts no artificial obstacles in the way of any man’s becoming the richest or most
learned in the state; which allows every man without other impediment than the
common obstacles of human nature and the equal rights of his neighbor impose,
to strive after wealth and knowledge and happiness. True Christian republican-
ism, by its benevolent and ennobling principles, impels the wealthy and the ed-
ucated to use their talents for the benefit of the whole community; it prompts to
acts of public spirit, to self-sacrifice, and to unwearied effort to lessen the natural
obstacles in the way of the poor and uneducated to competence and intellectual
character, by affording them both employment and education. The kindness and
benevolence thus shown to the poor beget in this class of our citizens, industry
and mental effort. They feel that they are not like the proscribed of other coun-
tries, they see that the way is equally open to all to rise to the same rank of
independence in mind and condition, and they consequently are without the
exciting causes of envy and ill-will and bitterness of feeling towards the wealthy
and educated, which exist and produce these fruits in other and arbitrary govern-
ments. Society in its two extremes is thus knit together by a mutual confidence,
and a mutual interest, for causes beyond human control are ever varying the
condition of men. He that is rich to-day may be poor to-morrow; and thus there
is a constant interchange, a mingling of ranks, which like a healthful circulation
in the natural body, begets soundness and vigor through the political body. The
vicious, and voluntarily ignorant being the only portions of society naturally and
justly excluded from the benefits of this system.
Let us now look at the condition of these same classes under an arbitrary
government. In Austria, for example, the poor and illiterate are considered as the
natural slaves of the wealthy and learned. These classes are perpetually separated by
the artificial barrier of hereditary right; the line of separation is distinctly drawn,
and in all that relates to social intercourse there is an impassable gulf. There
may be condescension on the one part, but no elevation on the other. High
birth, learning, wealth, and polished manners are on the one side, strengthening
the hands of the arbitrary power that sustains them; on the other, low birth, ig-
norance, poverty, and boorishness, kept down by their intrinsic weakness, gen-
eration after generation in irretrievable subjection; the upper classes knowing that
their own security is based upon the perpetuity of ignorance and superstition in
the lower classes…. We have a daily increasing host of emigrants, a portion of
the very class used to foreign servitude abroad. How could Austrian emissaries
Samuel F. B. Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Company,
1835), 159–163.
330 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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better serve their imperial master’s interests, than by keeping these unenlightened
men in the same mental darkness in which they existed in the countries from
which they came, surrounding them here with a police of priests, and shutting
out from them the light which might break in upon them in this land of light,
nourishing them for riot and turbulence, at political meetings, and for bullying at
the polls those of opposite political opinions? And what would be the effect of
such a mode of proceedings upon that class, who have acquired by lives of hon-
est industry and studious application, wealth, and knowledge, and political expe-
rience? Is not such a course calculated to drive them away from any participation
in the politics of the country, and is not such seditious conduct intended to pro-
duce this very result? Will not men who have any self-respect, who have any
sense of character, turn away and ask with feelings of indignation, where is that
intelligent, sober, orderly body of native mechanics and artizans, who once com-
posed the wholesome, substantial democracy of the country, and on whose
independence and rough good sense the country could always rely, that well-
tried body of their own fellow-citizens, accustomed to hear and read patiently,
and decide discreetly? And when they see them associated with a rude set of
priest-governed foreigners, strangers to the order and habits of our institutions,
requiting us for their hospitable reception by conduct subversive of the very in-
stitutions which make them freemen; when they see them become the dupes of
the machinations of a foreign despotic power, refusing to be undeceived, and
madly rushing to their own destruction, will they not from motives of self pres-
ervation be willing to adopt any system of measures, however, arbitrary, which
will secure society from violence and anarchy? When disgust at priest-guided
mobs shall have alienated the minds of one class of the citizens from the other,
we have then one of the parties nearly formed, which is necessary for the designs of
despotism in accomplishing the subversion of the republic. And the other party is
still easier formed. The alienation of feeling in the wealthier class, and their re-
marks of disgust, may be easily tortured into contempt for the classes below
them, and then the natural envy of the poor towards the rich, will always furnish
occasions to excite to violence. When hostility between these two parties has
reached a proper height, the signal from the arch jugglers in Europe to their
assistants here, can easily kindle the flames of civil strife. And then comes the
dextrous change of systems. Frequent outrage must be quelled by military force,
for the public peace must at all events be preserved, and the civil arm will have
become too weak, and thus commences an armed police, itself but the precursor of
a standing army. And which party will be the sufferer? All experience answers
that wealth and talent are more than a match for mere brute force, for the plain
reason that they can both purchase and direct it. The rich can pay for their protec-
tion, and soldiers belong to those who pay them…. It is the poor then, the poor
and ignorant, not the rich and learned, that have every thing of hope and liberty
to lose from the machinations of Austria. In a moral and intelligent Democracy,
the rich and poor are friends and equals, in a Popish despotism the poor are
in abject servitude to the rich. Let the working men, the laboring classes, well
considered that their liberty is in danger, and can be preserved only by their
encouragement of education and good order.
COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND IMMIGRATION IN THE NORTH 331
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3. Essayist Orestes Brownson Condemns
the Plight of “Wage Slaves,” 1840
No one can observe the signs of the times with much care, without perceiving
that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching….
In this coming contest there is a deeper question at issue than is commonly
imagined, a question which is but remotely touched in your controversies about
United States Banks and Sub-Treasuries, chartered Banking and free Banking,
free trade and corporations, although these controversies may be paving the
way for it to come up….
What we would ask is, throughout the Christian world the actual condition
of the laboring classes, viewed simply and exclusively in their capacity of
laborers? They constitute at least a moiety of the human race. We exclude the
nobility, we exclude also the middle class, and include only actual laborers, who
are laborers and not proprietors, owners of none of the funds of production,
neither houses, shops, nor lands, nor implements of labor, being therefore solely
dependent on their hands….
… We are not ignorant of the fact, that the merchant, who is literally the
common carrier and exchange dealer, performs a useful service, and is therefore
entitled to a portion of the proceeds of labor. But make all necessary deductions
on his account, and then ask what portion of the remainder is retained, either in
kind or in its equivalent, in the hands of the original producer, the workingman?
All over the world this fact stares us in the face, the workingman is poor and
depressed, while a large portion of the non-workingmen, in the sense we now
use the term, are wealthy. It may be laid down as a general rule, with but few
exceptions, that men are rewarded in an inverse ratio to the amount of actual
service they perform….
In regard to labor two systems obtain; one that of slave labor, the other that
of free labor. Of the two, the first is, in our judgement, except so far as the feel-
ings are concerned, decidedly the least oppressive. If the slave has never been a
free man, we think, as a general rule, his sufferings are less than those of the free
laborer at wages. As to actual freedom one has just about as much as the other.
The laborer at wages has all the disadvantages of freedom and none of its bles-
sings, while the slave, if denied the blessings, is freed from the disadvantages. We
are no advocates of slavery, we are as heartily opposed to it as any modern abo-
litionist can be; but we say frankly that, if there must always be a laboring popu-
lation distinct from proprietors and employers, we regard the slave system as
decidedly preferable to the system at wages. It is no pleasant thing to go days
without food, to lie idle for weeks, seeking work and finding none, to rise in
the morning with a wife and children you love, and know not where to procure
them a breakfast, and to see constantly before you no brighter prospect than the
almshouse. Yet these are no unfrequent incidents in the lives of our laboring
population…. It is said there is no want in this country. There may be less
Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review , 1840.
332 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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