Besides Philadelphia and New York
the mechanics secured the ten-hour day in Baltimore and Annapolis, but
in the District of Columbia and elsewhere they were still working twelve
or fourteen hours. In other words, the ten-hour day was secured only
where trade societies existed.

But the organized labor movement did not rest with a partial success.
The campaign of pressure on the President went on. Finally, although
somewhat belatedly, President Van Buren issued on March 31, 1840, the
famous executive order establishing the ten-hour day on government work
without a reduction in wages.

The victory came after the National Trades' Union had gone out of
existence and should be, more correctly, correlated with a labor
political movement. Early in 1837 came a financial panic. The industrial
depression wiped out in a short time every form of labor organization
from the trade societies to the National Trades' Union. Labor stood
defenseless against the economic storm. In this emergency it turned to
politics as a measure of despair.

The political dissatisfaction assumed the form of hostility towards
banks and corporations in general. The workingmen held the banks
responsible for the existing anarchy in currency, from which they
suffered both as consumers and producers. Moreover, they felt that there
was something uncanny and threatening about corporations with their
continuous existence and limited liability. Even while their attention
had been engrossed by trade unionism, the workingmen were awake to the
issue of monopoly. Together with their employers they had therefore
supported Jackson in his assault upon the largest "monster" of them
all--the Bank of the United States. The local organizations of the
Democratic party, however, did not always remain true to faith. In such
circumstances the workingmen, again acting in conjunction with their
masters, frequently extended their support to the "insurgent"
anti-monopoly candidates in the Democratic party conventions. Such a
revolt took place in Philadelphia in 1835; and in New York, although
Tammany had elected Ely Moore, the President of the General Trades'
Union of New York, to Congress in 1834, a similar revolt occurred. The
upshot was a triumphant return of the rebels into the fold of Tammany in
1837. During the next twenty years, Tammany came nearer to being a
workingmen's organization than at any other time in its career.

(4) _The Long Depression, 1837-1862_

The twe