During the first decade of the 19th century, employers tried to weaken labor organizations by initiating several trials to prosecute journeymen workers for conspiracy in restraint of trade. Prosecutors argued that associations of workers were illegal when they attempted to control wages or dictate conditions in the workplace. These cases represent key developments in labor as masters, who were once merely artisans who owned their own shop, became employers seeking to maximize profits.

The first, and most important, of these cases occurred in Philadelphia in 1806. Encouraged by master shoemakers, the prosecutors claimed that a group of journeymen shoemakers (also known as cordwainers) "did combine, conspire, confederate, and unlawfully agree together" to "increase and augment the prices and rates usually paid"; refused to work or lodge with other journeymen who were paid a lesser wage; threatened and intimidated those other workers and their employers; and "unlawfully perniciously, and deceitfully" designed and intended "to form and unite themselves into a club and combination." The case represented a culmination of developments that began in the early 1790s when the journeymen first organized an association--a labor union--in response to masters who were expanding production and driving wages down. Masters had shifted operations from "bespoke" work, which was done for a specific customer, to "shop" work, where shoes were made for general sale in the shop, and then to "order" work in which the master contracted for many pairs of shoes to be sold at a market in another city. In the process masters, who now made thousands of dollars a year, distanced themselves economically from shoemakers, who were lucky to earn a few hundred dollars a year.

The defense attorneys, including Caesar Rodney, pursued a four-pronged strategy. First, they argued a point of law by asserting that application of English common law, which was the basis of the prosecution's charge of conspiracy, was inappropriate. The American Revolution, contended the defense, had liberated colonial Americans from English tyranny, and that included the anachronistic precedents decided in feudal courts. Since Pennsylvania did not have a conspiracy statute, the defendants had violated no law. To convict, Rodney asserted, would mean reversing the outcome of the Revolution.

Second, they contested the facts of the case. The shoemakers had not restrained trade in any meaningful way. All they had done was decide for whom and with whom they would work. In other words, by refusing to work for an employer who hired scabs either during or after a strike, the defendants had merely exercised their rights as independent laborers. Nor, the lawyers claimed, did the shoemakers coerce anyone to join them.

Third, the lawyers relied on the U.S. Constitution by claiming that the workers had a right to establish an association under the First Amendment's "right of the people to assemble." Rodney facetiously pointed out that shoemakers had as much right to form an organization as people who joined a dance society, students organizing a college club, or the masters getting together to lobby the city government to prosecute the journeymen.

Finally, the defense asserted a sense of social justice embedded in the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution. Rodney decried the greediness of the masters who were unsatisfied "with the rapid rate at which they were at present amassing wealth" and wished "to make their fortunes by a single turn of the wheel." He was afraid that if the masters could dictate the terms of employment now, they might someday even determine where the journeymen could live and what they could eat.

These arguments resonated with many Philadelphians, even if they had little impact in the courtroom. William Duane, the radical Jeffersonian newspaper editor, wrote in the Aurora that "the case of the shoemakers is only another proof of the tendency of lazy luxury to enslave the men of industry who acquire their bread by labor." Judge Moses Levy, who like Duane and Rodney was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, saw things differently. If one branch of the Democratic-Republicans in the early 19th century remained concerned with the plight of the common man, another branch, represented in this instance by Levy, took the Jeffersonian emphasis on the importance of the individual and applied it to free-market economics. Levy told the jury before its deliberations, "The usual means by which the prices of work are regulated, are the demand of the article and the excellence of the fabric." Applying the ideas of Adam Smith, Levy proclaimed that "where the work is well done, and the demand is considerable, the prices will necessarily be high. Where the work is ill done, and the demand is inconsiderable, they will unquestionably be low." The effort by the journeymen shoemakers to set wages interfered with these laws of economics by instituting "an artificial regulation" and fixing an "arbitrary price, governed by a standard, controuled by no impartial person, but dependant on the will of the few who are interested." This approach was "the unnatural way of raising the price of goods and work," was counter to the public good, and constituted a conspiracy. Armed with this charge, the jury convicted the shoemakers.

The 1806 Philadelphia conspiracy case became a precedent for other antilabor prosecutions in the early republic and throughout the 19th century. When New York shoemakers went on strike in 1809, the masters pushed for a conspiracy trial. In this case the journeymen sought not only to dictate wages and control which journeymen the masters could hire, but also to limit the number of apprentices in each master's shop. Many masters had begun to use apprenticeship not as a means to train young men to become journeymen but as a source of cheap labor; the men would only be half-trained and would never become as skilled as the journeymen. The defense in the New York case reiterated many of the same arguments Rodney and the other defense attorneys had used in Philadelphia, with a similar lack of success. The journeymen were convicted and the control of the masters of their own shops vindicated.

Bibliography:

John Rogers Commons, ed., A Documentary History of Industrial Society, vols. 3-4 (Cleveland: The A.H. Clark Company, 1910-11)

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