Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rude, George (1975) Captain Swing. New York, NY: W.W.
Norton and Company, Inc., 384 pp.
Captain Swing is an enjoyable collaboration between E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude that depicts the social history of the English agricultural wage-laborers’ uprising of 1830. According to Hobsbawm and Rude, historiography of the laborers’ rising of 1830 is negligible. Most of what is known by the general public comes from J. L. And Barbara Hammond’s The Village Laborer published in 1911. They consider this an exceedingly valuable work, but state that the Hammonds oversimplified events in order to dramatize them. They placed too much emphasis on enclosure, oversimplified both the nature and prevalence of the “Speenhamland System” of poor relief, and neglected the range and scope of the uprising. Hobsbawm and Rude do not claim to present any new data, and believe that the Hammonds will still be read for enjoyment, but believe that by asking different questions, they can shed new light on the social history of the movement. Therefore, this book tries to “describe and analyze the most impressive episode in the English farm-labourers’ long and doomed struggle against poverty and degradation.”
In the nineteenth century, England had no peasantry to speak of in the sense that other nations did. Where families who owned or occupied their own small plot of land and cultivated it themselves, apart from work on their lord’s farms, farmed most of Europe, England’s “peasants” were agricultural wage-laborers. As such, both tithes and taxes hit them hard. Lords and farmers were also against tithes and taxes and tolerated or even welcomed some outcry against them. Most county leaders in 1830 agreed with the laborers, but the government in London did not.
Further, enclosure eliminated the common lands whose use had helped the very poor to live. As a result, the relationship between farmers and laborers changed to a “purely market relationship between employer and proletarian.” At the same time, work once done by annual servants was given over to wage labor. Farmers were driven by income rather than social concerns and it was cheaper to pay a small wage for all positions and let laborers pay their own living out of it than to provide them room and board, however minimal.
The laborers were not revolutionary, however. They did not wish to overturn the traditional social order. They merely demanded the restoration of their meager rights within it.
Farmers’ incomes were low, and in order to make a profit on what they produced, they begun to expand the regions in which they sold their products in. This was facilitated through the railroads, by which through a series of grants from the government as...
This means that men and women were entitled to a particular job and they were obliged to do their work. Agricultural societies assigned work in divergent ways and this helped them because there was increase in productivity.
Despite being celebrated for its industrial achievements, the very foundation by which society was predicated on in the Gilded Age crumbled as labor unrest grew. This sense of discontent on the part of laborers is demonstrated through the Haymarket Affair of 1866. Among those tried for the crime was August Spies, who in his “Address of August Spies,” compromises his own life by persistently undermining the legitimacy of the State to emphasize the determination of the collective for which he views himself as a “representative.” In his attempt to illuminate the injustices of the State and foreshadow the unremitting turmoil that will emerge with his murder, Spies simultaneously showcases the divisions within society at the time. Consequently, because it is a product of its time period, the “Address of August Spies” can be used not only as a means of understanding the Haymarket Affair but the dynamics of society as a whole.
“In the first years of peacetime, following the Revolutionary War, the future of both the agrarian and commercial society appeared threatened by a strangling chain of debt which aggravated the depressed economy of the postwar years”.1 This poor economy affected almost everyone in New England especially the farmers. For years these farmers, or yeomen as they were commonly called, had been used to growing just enough for what they needed and grew little in surplus. As one farmer explained “ My farm provides me and my family with a good living. Nothing we wear, eat, or drink was purchased, because my farm provides it all.”2 The only problem with this way of life is that with no surplus there was no way to make enough money to pay excessive debts. For example, since farmer possessed little money the merchants offered the articles they needed on short-term credit and accepted any surplus farm goods on a seasonal basis for payment. However if the farmer experienced a poor crop, shopkeepers usually extended credit and thereby tied the farmer to their businesses on a yearly basis.3 During a credit crisis, the gradual disintegration of the traditional culture became more apparent. During hard times, merchants in need of ready cash withdrew credit from their yeomen customers and called for the repayment of loans in hard cash. Such demands showed the growing power of the commercial elite.4 As one could imagine this brought much social and economic unrest to the farmers of New England. Many of the farmers in debt were dragged into court and in many cases they were put into debtors prison. Many decided to take action: The farmers waited for the legal due process as long as them could. The Legislature, also know as the General Court, took little action to address the farmers complaints. 5 “So without waiting for General Court to come back into session to work on grievances as requested, the People took matters into their own hands.”6 This is when the idea for the Rebellion is decided upon and the need for a leader was eminent.
Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, a Frenchman living in America, wrote many letters to Europeans telling them of the great opportunities for immigrants to America and its generous, welcoming, paternal government. However, a study of the farm workers ' experiences in America does not always paint a rosy picture. In particular, John Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez portrayed the dire circumstances of farm workers during the Great Depression (1930 's) and the 1960 's. Today my interview with a farm worker shows that farm workers today still face injustices.
Chants Democratic, by Sean Wilentz examined the emergence of New York’s labor class during the Jacksonian era and in essence revealed Artisan Republicanism. Wilentz offered a unique perspective in his historical analysis of the social and political labor histories during 1788 through 1850. Wilentz stressed the importance of the republicanism ideology in the creation of a working class that was instrumental in a pre-industrial New York. The author stressed the significance in both the political histories and social histories of the early nineteenth century by incorporating political ideologies and labor union descriptions. He further integrated these insights by means of articulating the social working conditions and lives of small masters, journeymen, and artisans to show their respective importance to the creation of the working class scruples. Chants Democratic iterated not only on the formation of the labor class in America, but also illuminated the changes within this new social class by exploring how antebellum New York’s population began to live and think.
The consequences for trying to gain freedom were severe which further limited the “freedom” the working class had as they were too afraid to exert their freedom in fear of harsh repercussions. For instance, in 1892, Carnegie was trying to tear down unions and in Homestead, Pennsylvania decided to fire everyone. However, if they signed a contract stating that they would not join a union, they could get their job back. In response to this, the workers struck back and started shooting the Pinkerton's and it got to the point where the company called in the state militia who defeated the strikers. This was known as the Homestead Strike and the surviving strikers were arrested and convicted of murder.
In 1820s and 1830s, laborers started finding their freedom and independence in the status of the society, the strikes and protests they raised succeed and the labor unions reflected the values of traditional patterns of labor, and labor’s rights first time be valued during that two decades. Nevertheless, keep the old tradition means stop developing, that’s the main failure of the industrial revolution in the United States. White men still led the whole labor movement of the society both on race and gender. The inequality between laborers and racial discrimination still existed, but wherever oppressions existed, there would be
These people had absolutely no role in politics or in society in general. Even as late as 1860, the workers had to depend on themselves only to improve their social conditions. During the Industrial Revolution, as the number of machines mu... ... middle of paper ... ... feelings prevailed over those of unification.
In the chapter “The Other Civil War,” Zinn contended that while the working class attempted to reform the labor system, the government suppressed tensions and turned class anger toward other outlets. Zinn described the poor working and living conditions of industrial laborers as proof of the need for labor reform. Overcrowding in cities, long work days, widespread disease, and other factors led workers to seek improvements. He presented numerous examples of strikes, rebellions, and riots to prove that class anger sometimes surfaced despite efforts to repress resistance. While he maintained that these reform attempts failed due to government intervention, many of these actions did result in some gains for the working class.
After the devastation left from the Civil War, many field owners looked for new ways to replace their former slaves with field hands for farming and production use. From this need for new field hands came sharecroppers, a “response to the destitution and disorganized” agricultural results of the Civil War (Wilson 29). Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion of the crops that they bring in for their landowners. These farmhands provided their labor, while the landowners provided living accommodations for the worker and his family, along with tools, seeds, fertilizers, and a portion of the crops that they had harvested that season. A sharecropper had “no entitlement to the land that he cultivated,” and was forced “to work under any conditions” that his landowner enforced (Wilson 798). Many landowners viewed sharecropping as a way to elude the now barred possession of slaves while still maintaining field hands for labor in an inexpensive and ample manner. The landowners watched over the sharecroppers and their every move diligently, with harsh supervision, and pressed the sharecroppers to their limits, both mentally and physically. Not only were the sharecroppers just given an average of one-fourth of their harvest, they had “one of the most inadequate incomes in the United States, rarely surpassing more than a few hundred dollars” annually (Wilson 30). Under such trying conditions, it is not hard to see why the sharecroppers struggled to maintain a healthy and happy life, if that could even be achieved. Due to substandard conditions concerning sharecropper’s clothing, insufficient food supplies, and hazardous health issues, sharecroppers competed on the daily basis to stay alive on what little their landowners had to offer them.
Kulikoff, A. (2000). From British peasants to colonial American farmers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Thane, P (1978) 'Women & the Poor Law in Victorian & Edwardian England', History Workshop, 6(1), pp. 29+31-51.
The problem with society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the equality of all persons was few and far between. The bourgeoisie was in control of all the power and the proletariats were basically under their control. It was as if the bourgeoisie “originated out of the old medieval peasant class, in opposition to the medieval titled aristocracy.” [ii] They had taken over everything; the oppressed class lived by their rules and ways of life. Their way of life was not a happy one; family was based upon money instead of love. “Capital developed in the same proportion as the class of laborers developed.” ii Life then seemed simple for those living the life of the bourgeoisie, b...