I wish we had more labor history in Salem’s Centuries. We have a great piece by Avi Chomsky on the Pequot Mills Strike of 1933, but I’d like a bit more on the transformation of Salem’s economy a century earlier from a labor perspective. More specifically, I’d like to understand the occupational evolution that accompanied the decline of the city’s maritime trade-based economy from the 1830s on. As an early modernist, my view of labor history is a bit more focused on occupation than organization. Someone should write a history of the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company, which is always heralded as the engine that facilitated Salem’s transition from trade to industry, but until that time we’ll just have to fumble around in the dark nineteenth century. [Of course, we need many more studies of the Salem Witch Trials so we can shed so much more light on that unfortunate event!] I did have a cool idea to use architectural history, or I should say building histories, as a means to chart occupational change, using the wonderful house plaques of Historic Salem, Inc., but that project looks a little intimidating now. But just as I was looking around for something new/old to feature this Labor Day, I came across this great list of workers in Salem in 1834, a “memorial” assembled by the Whig Party, who represented a staunch resistance to President Andrew Jackson. The specific reference here is the “Bank War” of the 1830s,  provoked by Jackson’s (successful) policy to crush the Second National Bank of America which he claimed served only a narrow aristocracy. The Whigs believed the Bank served a much wider constituency, and Massachusetts Representative Edward Everett (he’s the guy that would give the LONG speech at Gettysburg before Lincoln’s address several decades later) brought this memorial before Congress to make that point.

Salem Gazette 4/22/1834

The Whigs were a short-lived party named for longer-lived British party, in perpetual opposition to the Crown. And so the American Whigs opposed “King” Andrew Jackson. It’s a timely exercise to explore their opposition, but I’m here for the occupational history. As you can see, the Whigs did not differentiate between labor “of the mind and the hands,” (their phrase–I think handiwork requires mind-work), and so we get the full spectrum of work in Salem, 1834. This was a transitional decade for the city: the dynamic Asian trades were dwindling but there were still other markets out there—hence a lot of “traders”. Fewer “mariners” than boot and shoe manufacturers, in addition to many tanners: this is a preview of Salem’s emerging shoe industry. As always, there was considerable overlap between the work involved in building ships and houses. Representative Everett assured his fellow congressmen that he had names and signatures, verified by Salem’s town clerk, but wanted to present a “proportion of the intelligence, capital, industry and business of all kinds of the population of the ancient town of Salem.” Just the year before, President Jackson had been politely received in Salem, but now he was “King Andrew”.

Tennessee Virtual Library

It appears that class consciousness had not quite developed in Salem in 1834, but that very same year marked the first of the strikes of the female will workers in Lowell, just an hour or so away. Strike documents like the broadside below can give us some insights into women’s work at this time that the Salem memorial does not offer. The Whigs surveyed Salem’s male voters for their occupations; the work of disenfranchised women was of little consequence. But the Lowell “mill girls” were taking names too.

Boston Rare Maps