Civil Society Divided Against Itself:   The Fight for Shorter Hours in Antebellum America

In 1833, the New England mill worker and school teacher Thomas Man published Picture of a Factory Village, a poetic indictment of the factory system as a new form of social tyranny. 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,” that is, a “tyrant capital” in “conflict with the natural rights of society.”