default,
for lien laws had not yet found their way into the statute books.
Militia service was oppressive, permitting only the rich to buy
exemption. It was still considered an unlawful conspiracy to act in
unison for an increase in pay or a lessening of working hours. By 1840
the pay of unskilled labor had dropped to about seventy-five cents a day
in the overcrowded cities, and in the winter, in either city or country,
many unskilled workers were glad to work for merely their board. The
lot of women workers was especially pitiful. A seamstress by hard toil,
working fifteen hours a day might stitch enough shirts to earn from
seventy-two cents to a dollar and twelve cents a week. Skilled labor,
while faring better in wages, shared with the unskilled in the universal
working day which lasted from sun to sun. Such in brief were the
conditions that brought home to the laboring masses that homogeneous
consciousness which alone makes a group powerful in a democracy.

The movement can most clearly be discerned in the cities. Philadelphia
claims precedence as the home of the first Trades' Union. The master
cordwainers had organized a society in 1792, and their journeymen had
followed suit two years later. The experiences and vicissitudes of these
shoemakers furnished a useful lesson to other tradesmen, many of whom
were organized into unions. But they were isolated organizations, each
one fighting its own battles. In 1897 the Mechanics' Union of Trade
Associations was formed. Of its significance John R. Commons says:

England is considered the home of trade-unionism, but the distinction
belongs to Philadelphia.... The first trades' union in England was that
of Manchester, organized in 1829, although there seems to have been an
attempt to organize one in 1824. But the first one in America was the
"Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations," organized in Philadelphia in
1827, two years earlier. The name came from Manchester, but the thing
from Philadelphia. Neither union lasted long. The Manchester union lived
two years, and the Philadelphia union one year. But the Manchester union
died and the Philadelphia union metamorphosed into politics. Here again
Philadelphia was the pioneer, for it called into being the first labor
party. Not only this, but through the Mechanics' Union Philadelphia
started probably the first wage-earners' paper ever published--the
'Mechanics Free Press'--antedating, in January, 1828, the first similar
journ