of
humanitarianism.

The trade union wave of the fifties was so short lived and the trade
unionists were so preoccupied with the pressing need of advancing their
wages to keep pace with the soaring prices caused by the influx of
California gold, that we miss the tendency which was so strong in the
thirties to reach out for a wider basis of labor organization in city
trades' unions, and ultimately in a National Trades' Union. On the other
hand, the fifties foreshadowed a new form of expansion of labor
organization--the joining together in a nation-wide organization of all
local unions of one trade. The printers[9] organized nationally in
1850, the locomotive engineers and the hat-finishers in 1854; and the
iron molders, and the machinists and blacksmiths in 1859; in addition
there were at least a half dozen less successful attempts in other
trades.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] See below, 147-148.

[3] See below, 148-149.

[4] See below, 270-272.

[5] The workingmen felt that they required leisure to be able to
exercise their rights of citizens.

[6] The ship carpenters had been similarly defeated in 1832.

[7] For a detailed discussion of these trials see below, 149-152.

[8] Published in 1916 by the Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 16-18.

[9] The printers had organized nationally for the first time in 1836,
but the organization lasted less than two years; likewise the
cordwainers or shoemakers. But we must keep in mind that what
constituted national organization in the thirties would pass only for
regional or sectional organization in later years.

CHAPTER 2

THE "GREENBACK" PERIOD, 1862-1879

The few national trade unions which were formed at the close of the
fifties did not constitute by themselves a labor movement. It needed the
industrial prosperity caused by the price inflation of the Civil War
time to bring forth again a mass movement of labor.

We shall say little of labor's attitude towards the question of war and
peace before the War had started. Like many other citizens of the North
and the Border States the handful of organized workers favored a
compromise. They held a labor convention in Philadelphia, in which a
great labor leader of the sixties, William H. Sylvis, President of the
International Molders' Union, took a prominent part and pronounced in
favor of the compromise solution advanced by Congressman Crittenden of
Kentucky. But no sooner had Fort Sumter been fired upon by the
secessionists