Civil Society Divided Against Itself: The Fight for Shorter Hours in Antebellum America
“Hark! don’t you hear the Factory Bell? / Of wit and learning ‘tis the knell!”
Introduction
In 1833, the New England mill worker and schoolteacher Thomas Man published Picture of a Factory Village, a poetic indictment of the factory system as a new form of social tyranny.[1] The volume opens with a stark woodcut: a factory building looms, rigid and symmetrical, its tower crowned by a bell marked “ERECTED 1828.” Beneath it, a crowd of laborers rushes toward the door—men, women, and children alike. One is kicked forward by an overseer’s boot. The bell overhead tolls not just for work, but, as the caption warns, for the death of thought: “Of wit and learning ’tis the knell!” For Man, the factory bell did more than regulate labor—it foreclosed the moral and intellectual development of the human species. It was the sound of time alienated, of mental life subordinated to the demands of production. As an emblem of impersonal domination, the bell marks a historical rupture: the reorganization of society around an abstract compulsion—what Philadelphia’s shorter-hour reformer William Heighton called, the “unjust abstraction,”[2] that is, a “tyrant capital” in “conflict with the natural rights of society.”[3]
Over half a century earlier, Adam Smith had warned that the division of labor risked reducing the modern worker to “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[4] By the 1830s, such fears had hardened into social reality in Northern cities. The permanence of wage labor, the volatility of unemployment, and the rise of economic dependence posed a novel crisis—what contemporaries increasingly called the “Social Question.”[5] On both sides of the Atlantic, it split the republican tradition from within, confronting political thinkers with a new challenge: how to reconcile the promise of liberty with the unfreedom of capitalist social relations.
The social question in America is often cast as a product of the Second Industrial Revolution—of Gilded Age monopolies, permanent class divides, and violent postwar strikes. But its conceptual roots reach deeper, into the unsettled terrain of the antebellum republic. This article turns to the antebellum period, when the first stirrings of industrialization unsettled older republican ideals. In the factories and workshops of New England and Philadelphia, reformers began to confront the corrosive effects of wage labor and destabilization of democratic life. Here, decades before the rise of the Gilded Age order, workingmen reimagined the meaning of freedom, debated the ends of republican government, and began to interrogate the social purpose of their collective labor. This new perspective was forged in a period of mass migration, when the presence of Fourierites, English Chartists, Owenites and German socialists, among others, brought together concerns on both sides of the Atlantic.[6]
In the manufacturing centers of antebellum America, this conflict came to a head in the fight for the ten-hour workday. American reformers identified and diagnosed the problem as the “non-recognition and non-guarantee” of a fundamental right: “the right of labor.” Without it, they argued, all other rights became “to a very great extent unavailable and worthless.” In pamphlets, petitions, and polemics, labor reformers accused the law of siding with capital, perpetuating a “destructive war” of “capital against labor… and man against man.”[7] In the debates over the shorter working day, both laborers and employers faced each other with opposing claims before the law. Lowell’s workers asked: if labor is free, why should the employer dictate its limits? Why should the machine run past ten hours, against the will of those who tend it? Juridical solutions in antebellum America only deepened a growing suspicion among reformers that a “selfish legislation” could not guarantee the unity of the polity.[8] These labor reformers saw a civil society divided against itself, where a republic could not stand.
As pressure on domestic production in antebellum America gave rise to a dependent wage worker, debates across workingmen’s clubs, newspapers and pamphlets displayed a growing anxiety over a novel “social tyranny” and the “tendencies of modern society to sink the masses in poverty and ignorance.”[9] But the social tyranny they identified bore a peculiar impersonal character. As Man put it, “the factory system… [fed] like a vampire from [the laborer’s] veins.” Even capitalists, as Karl Marx observed, who felt “satisfied and affirmed in their self-alienation,”[10] were lulled by an illusory comfort, for they too moved at the mercy of capital’s command. Boom-bust cycles, rapid innovation, and job precarity exposed the instability of the entire social order. These historically unprecedented changes put into question the long-standing belief that American workers would be spared the unhappy fate of their European counterparts—as Man noted, “Great Britain’s curse is now our own.”[11]
What emerged by the mid-nineteenth century was a new kind of transatlantic politics—what I call a social democratic politics—grounded in the recognition of a common social condition across national borders, that is, beyond the confines of a republican polity. Republicans who took a position on these questions, like the English Chartist Joseph Harney or the French radical Louis Blanc, were often referred to as “Red Republicans,” “Socialist-democrats,” or “democratic-socialists.” [12] Their aim was the creation of “a new social system,” or as one radical Chartist wrote, a democracy “not only in government, but throughout every industrial department of society.” [13] To rein in the ungoverned transformation of social life, nineteenth-century social democrats demanded greater control over the conditions of production, arguing that the republic itself had been taken hostage by capital’s unchecked command. This emerging grammar of politics did not merely adapt republican ideals; it redefined freedom through the lens of social cooperation. Admittedly, this goal required the political empowerment of labor, which meant that the republic remained the political battlefield. The republic, in other words, remained the necessary means toward a newly specified end: social democracy.
Antebellum reformers were not simply extending the republican tradition but actively reworking its conceptual foundations. Faced with the compulsion of industrial capitalism, they struggled to reconcile inherited ideals of liberty and political independence with the realities of wage labor and transformed social relations. In this context, republican language no longer served as a stable grammar of political meaning but became the terrain of ideological struggle. What emerged, unevenly and often implicitly, was a redefinition of freedom—not just as non-domination, but as the collective capacity to shape the conditions of life. That conceptual movement is traced across the arc of this article: from the fractures within Jeffersonian thought, to the shorter-hours petitions, the Owenite critique of social relations, and finally the contested emergence of the Social Republic. These were not isolated episodes but linked efforts to clarify the ends of republican government under novel conditions—and to repurpose the republic as a means toward democratic control over production itself.
The focus here is on the first half of the nineteenth century—before the revolutions that would convulse Europe, and before the American Civil War forced its own crisis of republican meaning. I examine how labor reformers in Philadelphia and New England articulated a new political consciousness in response to the unprecedented conditions of early industrialization. Shorter-hour advocates reached beyond republican thought into normative claims found in the “radical science” of political economy via an Owenite critique of society.[14] They then supplemented Owen’s apolitical approach to change with propositions by Chartists and Parisian radicals—namely, the democratic control of production under a novel “Social Republic,” akin to what the French called the “République démocratique et sociale” in 1848.[15] Drawing from transatlantic currents, American reformers reconceived the republic as an instrument of social transformation—a means to extend the reach of political power into the sphere of social production and exchange, or what the associationist L.W. Ryckman called an “Industrial Revolutionary Government.” [16]
This approach intervenes in recent historiographical trends that place nineteenth-century social reformers under the broad rubric of republicanism. Building on the work of Quentin Skinner, scholars have recentered liberty—as non-domination—as a core ideal in Anglo-American political thought, recovering its critical force in the face of arbitrary power.[17] This has brought renewed focus to the emancipatory potential within the republican tradition, especially in its critique of domination. However, such frameworks can obscure how reformers grappled not only with political tyranny but with capitalism’s historically unprecedented transformation of social relations. To frame their concerns solely in terms of domination is to miss the deeper challenge they confronted: how to think about freedom under the new, impersonal compulsion of capital. As Bruno Leopold argues, the social question prompted conceptual innovation, not merely political adjustment. Likewise, Alex Gourevitch shows how working-class thinkers transformed republican categories to articulate a vision of freedom grounded in collective agency and economic self-determination—a vision crystallized in the call for a “Cooperative Commonwealth.” To read these figures simply as a continuation of the republican tradition is to miss the generative tension in their thought—their effort to carry liberal and republican ideals beyond their classical contours, toward a new politics of nineteenth-century social democracy.
Labor reformers redefined liberty in response to the new social relations and productive capacities. I treat the political imagination of antebellum labor reformers as dynamic, reinscribed through the struggle over the “meaning in use” of shared political values in a period of rapid social change.[18] Their politics did not unfold along a simple, linear path from republicanism to social democracy; rather, they reworked inherited concepts under strain, testing the limits of republican independence and expanding the conceptual terrain of social rights. Central concerns such as independence, the common good, and the rights of laboring citizens persisted, but their content and application transformed. Reformers reframed freedom not only as non-domination, but as the fulfillment of the liberal promise of free association, that is, of the generative and open-ended productive capacities of the human species and its self-transformation—a positive sociability.[19] Theirs was a politics of transition—emergent, unstable, and generative—born in the shell of republican language but propelled beyond it by the force of new realities. This article positions itself within the history of political concepts, foregrounding the unstable space between continuity and rupture in which the early language of social democracy was forged.
The following sections trace a conceptual transformation: from the fault lines within early republican thought to the political innovations of labor reformers who pressed its language and institutions beyond inherited meanings…
Article is in press (September 2025), with Modern Intellectual History
[1] Thomas Man, Picture of a Factory Village (Providence, Rhode Island: Printed for the author, 1833).
[2] William Heighton, “An Address to the Members of Trade Societies and to the Working Classes Generally” (Philadelphia, 1827), quoted in Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); 77.
[3] Voice of Industry (VoI), November 14, 1845.
[4] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 2: 303.
[5] Holly Case, The Age of Questions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Case, “The ‘Social Question,’ 1820–1920,” Modern Intellectual History 13:3 (2016), 747–75; Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring (New York: Crown Publishers, 2023), 15–92; Salih Emre Gerçek, “The ‘Social Question’ as a Democratic Question: Louis Blanc’s Organization of Labor,” Modern Intellectual History 20 (2023), 388–416; Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2018), 88–128. For a thoughtful contribution on the emergence and centrality of “the social” in eighteenth-century revolutionary thought, see Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 54–61.
[6] C.A., The Birth of the Modern World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Dirk Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985); Hoerder, “Proletariat Mass Migration” in Cultures in Context (Duke University Press, 2002); John Jentz and Richard Schneirov, Chicago in the Age of Capital (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative (Ithaca, New York, 1991); Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Hartmut Keil, “German Working-Class Radicalism after the Civil War” in The German-American Encounter, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Mark Lause, Young America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).
[7] “Lowell Convention, March, 1845, Preamble and Resolutions,” The Awl, April 5, 1845.
[8] Harriett Hanson Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1898), 12.
[9] The Mechanic, July 13, 1844; “Lowell Convention…” The Awl, April 5, 1845.
[10] Man, Picture of a Factory Village; Karl Marx, “The Holy Family (1845),” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 4: 36. I use here Robert Tucker’s translation for this phrase, see The Marx‑Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 133–135.
[11] Man, Picture of a Factory Village.
[12] Richard Ashcraft, “Liberal Political Theory and Working-Class Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century England,” Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 249–72; Peter Gurney, “The Democratic Idiom: Languages of Democracy in the Chartist Movement,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 3 (September 2014): 527–565.
[13] Poor Man’s Guardian, October 4, 1834, 3, quoted in Ashcraft, “Liberal Political,” 259.
[14] Sean Monahan, “The American Workingmen’s Parties, Universal Suffrage, and Marx’s Democratic Communism,” Modern Intellectual History 18:2 (2021), 379–402, 383; Burno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2024), 190–203. For an authoritative account of Owen’s antipolitical ideas, see Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[15] Jean-Fabien Spitz, “Louis Blanc: La république démocratique et sociale,” in Louis Blanc, Textes Politiques, 1839–1882, ed. Spitz (Latresne: Le Bord de l’eau, 2011), 8–75; Leo Loubère, Louis Blanc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961); Rosenblatt, Lost History of Liberalism; William Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Clark, Revolutionary Spring; See also Gerçek, “The ‘Social Question’”.
[16] “Lowell Convention…” The Awl, April 5, 1845.
[17] Quentin Skinner, “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Skinner and Maurizio Viroli, Gisela Bock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gourevitch, Cooperative Commonwealth; William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017); Bruno Leipold, “Marx’s Social Republic: Radical Republicanism and the Political Institutions of Socialism” in Radical Republicanism, eds., Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White (Oxford University Press, 2020); Leipold, Citizen Marx.
[18] Following Richard Ashcraft, I treat ideological conflict not as a clash of incommensurable worldviews, but as a struggle over the “meaning in use” of shared political values. Ashcraft, “Liberal Political Theory,” 249–250.
[19] Ashcraft, “Liberal Political Theory”; Claeys, Citizens and Saints; See also Fabrice Bensimon, “Continental Exiles, Chartists and Socialists in London (1834–1848),” History of European Ideas 47, no. 2 (2021): 271–84.
