"Would you free your country and the sons of toil everywhere from the heartless, irresponsible mastery of the aristocracy of avarice?....Then join with your neighbors to form a true American party...whose chief measures will be first to limit the quantity of land that any one may henceforth monopolize or inherit; and second to make the public lands free to actual settlers only, each having the right to sell his improvements to any man not possessed of other lands.""Vote yourself a farm" became a popular shibboleth and a part of the standard programme of organized labor.The donation of public lands to heads of families, on condition of occupancy and cultivation for a term of years, was proposed in bills repeatedly introduced in Congress.But the cry of opposition went up from the older States that they would be bled for the sake of the newer, that giving land to the landless was encouraging idleness and wantonness and spreading demoralization, and that Congress had no more power to give away land than it had to give away money.These arguments had their effect at the Capitol, and it was not until the new Republican party came into power pledged to "a complete and satisfactory homestead measure" that the Homestead Act of 1862 was placed on the statute books.
A characteristic manifestation of the humanitarian impulse of the forties was the support given to labor in its renewed demand for a ten-hour day.It has already been indicated how this movement started in the thirties, how its object was achieved by a few highly organized trades, and how it was interrupted in its progress by the panic of 1837.The agitation, however, to make the ten-hour day customary throughout the country was not long in coming back to life.In March, 1840, an executive order of President Van Buren declaring ten hours to be the working day for laborers and mechanics in government employ forced the issue upon private employers.The earliest concerted action, it would seem, arose in New England, where the New England Workingmen's Association, later called the Labor Reform League, carried on the crusade.In 1845 a committee appointed by the Massachusetts Legislature to investigate labor conditions affords the first instance on record of an American legislature concerning itself with the affairs of the labor world to the extent of ordering an official investigation.The committee examined a number of factory operatives, both men and women, visited a few of the mills, gathered some statistics, and made certain neutral and specious suggestions.They believed the remedy for such evils as they discovered lay not in legislation but "in the progressive improvement in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man's destiny, in a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority."The first ten-hour law was passed in 1847 by the New Hampshire Legislature.It provided that "ten hours of actual labor shall be taken to be a day's work, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties," and that no minor under fifteen years of age should be employed more than ten hours a day without the consent of parent or guardian.This was the unassuming beginning of a movement to have the hours of toil fixed by society rather than by contract.
This law of New Hampshire, which was destined to have a widespread influence, was hailed by the workmen everywhere with delight; mass meetings and processions proclaimed it as a great victory; and only the conservatives prophesied the worthlessness of such legislation.Horace Greeley sympathetically dissected the bill.He had little faith, it is true, in legislative interference with private contracts."But," he asks, "who can seriously doubt that it is the duty of the Commonwealth to see that the tender frames of its youth are not shattered by excessively protracted toil?....Will any one pretend that ten hours per day, especially at confining and monotonous avocations which tax at once the brain and the sinews are not quite enough for any child to labor statedly and steadily?" The consent of guardian or parent he thought a fraud against the child that could be averted only by the positive command of the State specifically limiting the hours of child labor.
In the following year Pennsylvania enacted a law declaring ten hours a legal day in certain industries and forbidding children under twelve from working in cotton, woolen, silk, or flax mills.
Children over fourteen, however, could, by special arrangement with parents or guardians, be compelled to work more than ten hours a day."This act is very much of a humbug," commented Greeley, "but it will serve a good end.Those whom it was intended to put asleep will come back again before long, and, like Oliver Twist, 'want some more.'"The ten-hour movement had thus achieved social recognition.It had the staunch support of such men as Wendell Phillips, Edward Everett, Horace Greeley, and other distinguished publicists and philanthropists.Public opinion was becoming so strong that both the Whigs and Democrats in their party platforms declared themselves in favor of the ten-hour day.When, in the summer of 1847, the British Parliament passed a ten-hour law, American unions sent congratulatory messages to the British workmen.
Gradually the various States followed the example of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania--New Jersey in 1851, Ohio in 1852, and Rhode Island in 1853--and the "ten-hour system" was legally established.
