usetts, a "Female Society of Lynn and Vicinity
for the Protection and Promotion of Female Industry" operated during
1833 and 1834 among the shoe binders and had at one time 1000 members,
who, like the seamstresses, were home workers and earned scanty wages.

Where nearly every trade was in motion, it did not take long to discover
a common direction and a common purpose. This was expressed in city
"trades' unions," or federations of all organized trades in a city, and
in its ascendency over the individual trade societies.

The first trades' union was organized August 14, 1833, in New York.
Baltimore followed in September, Philadelphia in November, and Boston in
March 1834. New York after 1820 was the metropolis of the country and
also the largest industrial and commercial center. There the house
carpenters had struck for higher wages in the latter part of May 1833,
and fifteen other trades met and pledged their support. Out of this grew
the New York Trades' Union. It had an official organ in a weekly, the
_National Trades' Union_, published from 1834 to 1836, and a daily, _The
Union_, issued in 1836. Ely Moore, a printer, was made president. Moore
was elected a few months later as the first representative of labor in
Congress.

In addition, trades' unions were organized in Washington; in New
Brunswick and Newark, New Jersey; in Albany, Troy, and Schenectady, New
York; and in the "Far West"--Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville.

Except in Boston, the trades' unions felt anxious to draw the line
between themselves and the political labor organizations of the
preceding years. In Philadelphia, where as we have seen, the formation
of an analogous organization, the Mechanics' Union of Trade Associations
of 1828, had served as a preliminary for a political movement, the
General Trades' Union took especial precaution and provided in the
constitution that "no party, political or religious questions shall at
any time be agitated in or acted upon in the Union." Its official organ,
the _National Laborer_, declared that "_the Trades' Union never will be
political_ because its members have learned from experience that the
introduction of politics into their societies has thwarted every effort
to ameliorate their conditions."

The repudiation of active politics did not carry with it a condemnation
of legislative action or "lobbying." On the contrary, these years
witnessed the first sustained legislative campaign that was ever
c