While women labored to reform society behind the scenes, men protested on the streets. The eighteen-teens marked the beginning of a decades-long struggle between labor and business. During the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, factories had closed when the banks failed. In New York, a workingman’s wages fell from 75 cents to 12 cents a day. Those who suffered the most were men too poor to vote; it was, in many ways, the suffering of workingmen during that Panic of 1819 that had led so many men to fight for the right to vote, so that they could have a hand in the direction of affairs. Having secured the franchise, they attacked the banks and all manner of monopolies. In 1828, laborers in Philadelphia formed the Working Men’s Party. One writer in 1830 argued that commercial banking was “the foundation of artificial inequality of wealth, and, thereby, of artificial inequality of power.”
Workingmen demanded shorter hours (ten, instead of eleven or twelve) and better conditions. They argued, too, against “an unequal and very excessive accumulation of wealth and power into the hands of a few.” Jacksonian democracy distributed political power to the many, but industrialization consolidated economic power in the hands of a few. In Boston, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 10 percent of wealth in 1689, 16 percent in 1771, 33 percent in 1833, and 37 percent in 1848, while the lowest 80 percent of the population controlled 39 percent of the wealth in 1689, 29 percent in 1771, 14 percent in 1833, and a mere 4 percent in 1848. Much the same pattern obtained elsewhere. In New York, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 50 percent in 1845; the top 4 percent of the population controlled 63 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 80 percent in 1845.
Native-born workingmen had to contend with the ease with which factory owners could replace them with immigrants who were arriving in unprecedented numbers, fleeing hunger and revolution in Europe and seeking democracy and opportunity in the United States. Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers. Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends, urging them to pack their bags. “This is a free country,” a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. “And nobody needs to hold his hat in his hand for anyone else.” A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, “The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted.”
In 1831, twenty thousand Europeans migrated to the United States; in 1854, that number had risen to more than four hundred thousand. While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number—two and a half million—arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone. As a proportion of the U.S. population, European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation’s rate of immigration “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.”
The largest number of these immigrants were Irish and German. Critics of Jackson—himself the son of Irish immigrants—had blamed his election on the rising population of poor, newly enfranchised Irishmen. “Everything in the shape of an Irishman was drummed to the polls,” one newspaper editor wrote in 1828. By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic. As the flood of immigrants swelled, the force of nativism gained strength, as did hostility toward Catholics, fueled by the animus of evangelical Protestants.