1825.

WAGES.

121

CHAPTER XLIV.

STATE OF THE COUNTRY FROM 1825 TO 1829.

THE Social and economic conditions of the working people in the cities-conditions out of which the early labor movements grew did indeed call loudly for reform. Ten years of rapid industrial development had brought into prominence problems of urban life and municipal government familiar enough to us, but new and quite beyond solution in 1825. The influx of paupers to partake of the benefits of the many charitable societies; the overcrowded labor market; the steadily increasing number of unemployed; the housing of the poor; the rise of the tenement house; the congestion of population in limited areas, with all its attendant vice and crime; and the destitution produced by low wages and lack of constant employment, had already become matters for serious consideration. An unskilled laborer, a hod-carrier, a wood-sawyer, a wood-piler in a city was fortunate if he received seventy-five cents for twelve hours of work and found employment for three hundred days in a year. Hundreds were glad to work for thirty-seven and even twenty-five cents a day in winter who in spring and summer could earn sixty-two and a half or perhaps eighty-seven and a half cents by toiling fourteen hours. On the canals and turnpikes fifteen dollars a month and found in summer and one third that sum in winter were considered good pay. In truth, it was not uncommon during the winter for men to work for their board. Nothing but perfect health, steady work, sobriety, the strictest economy, and the help of his wife could enable a married man to live on such wages. But the earnings of women were lower yet. Many trades and occupations now open to them either had no existence or were

then confined to men. They might bind shoes, sew rags, fold and stitch books, become spoolers, or make coarse shirts and duck pantaloons at eight or ten cents a piece. Shirt-making was eagerly sought after, because the garments could be made in the lodgings of the seamstress, who was commonly the mother of a little family, and often a widow. Yet the most expert could not finish more than nine shirts a week, for which. she would receive seventy-two or ninety cents. Fifty cents seems to have been the average.

To the desperate poverty produced by such wages many evils were attributed. Intemperance was encouraged, children were sent into the streets to beg and pilfer, and young girls were driven to lives of shame to an extent which but for the report of the Magdalene Society in New York and the action of the people * elsewhere would be incredible. The cities, in short, were growing with great rapidity, and were exhibiting every phase of life.

At New York, now the metropolis of the country, the growth of the city was astonishing to its own citizens. The population numbered one hundred and sixty-two thousand, an increase of forty thousand in five years. To keep pace with such an inpouring of strangers was hardly possible. More than three thousand buildings were under way in 1825; † yet such was the press that not an unoccupied dwelling house existed in the entire city, and it was quite common to see families living in houses with unfinished floors, with windows destitute of sashes, and in which the carpenters had not hung a single door. Nor was this an accident. Year after year the same thing occurred, and on one first of May-the great "moving day "-three hundred homeless people gathered in the park with their household goods and were lodged in the jail till the houses they had rented were finished and made habitable.

* At Portland the people on three occasions gathered and pulled down houses of ill fame. Portland Argus, November 11 and 14, 1825. A similar riot occurred in Boston. New York Evening Post, August 1, 1825.

+ Most of these houses were built by speculators, and were erected so cheaply and hastily that several fell down while in course of construction; others were torn down by order of the authorities.

1825.

TRADE AND COMMERCE OF NEW YORK.

123

In the upper wards entire blocks of fine brick buildings had arisen on sites which in 1820 were covered with marshes or occupied with straggling frame huts of little value. In the neighborhood of Canal Street a new city stood on what a few years before was the shore of a stagnant pool. In Greenwich new streets had been opened, and all along the Bowery new houses had been put up. Never in the history of the city had its commerce been greater. Ten million dollars had been collected in duties in one year, a sum larger by eighty thousand than in the same time had been gathered at the customhouses of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Savannah combined. Sixteen packets plied regularly between the city and Liverpool. Four more were engaged in trade with Havre. Seven were in the Savannah line, ten in the Charleston line, and four in the New Orleans, while innumerable brigs, sloops, schooners, and steamboats made stated trips to every seaport of importance on the coast. The city, it was said boastfully, was visited by merchants of every clime and from every part of the United States, so that New York might truly be called the mart of nations. Nor was this an idle boast. Five hundred new mercantile houses were said to have been established in the city in the early months of 1825, a statement well borne out by the crowded condition of the mercantile newspapers. The Gazette in seven days contained 1,115 new advertisements,* and in one issue, a week later, printed 213, and stated that 23 others were left out for want of space.†

There were now twelve banks in the city, with an aggregate capital of thirteen millions of dollars, paying dividends of from five to eight per cent., and ten marine insurance companies with a capital of ten million dollars. Yet even these were not enough to transact the volume of business, and when the Legislature met applications were made for charters for twenty-seven more banks with a combined capital of twentytwo and a half millions, and for thirty-one corporations of all sorts with a total capital of fifteen millions.

Thirteen hundred sailing vessels entered the port yearly.

*New York Gazette, April 14 to 21, 1825.

+ New York Gazette, April 26, 1825.