rsons in Faneuil Hall. This union was formed primarily to
fight for the ten-hour day, and the leading crusaders were the house
carpenters, the ship carpenters, and the masons. Similar unions
presently sprang up in other cities, including Baltimore, Albany, Troy,
Washington, Newark, Schenectady, New Brunswick, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati,
and St. Louis. By 1835 all the larger centers of industry were familiar
with the idea, and most of them with the practice, of the trades
organizations of a community uniting for action.

The local unions were not unmindful of the need for wider action, either
through a national union of all the organizations of a single trade,
or through a union of all the different trades' unions. Both courses
of action were attempted. In 1834 the National Trades' Union came into
being and from that date held annual national conventions of all the
trades until the panic of 1837 obliterated the movement. When the first
convention was called, it was estimated that there were some 26,250
members of trades' unions then in the United States. Of these 11,500
were in New York and its vicinity, 6000 in Philadelphia, 4000 in Boston,
and 3500 in Baltimore. Meanwhile a movement was under way to federate
the unions of a single trade. In 1835 the cordwainers attending the
National Trades Union' formed a preliminary organization and called a
national cordwainers' convention. This met in New York in March, 1836,
and included forty-five delegates from New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
and Connecticut. In the fall of 1836 the comb-makers, the carpenters,
the hand-loom weavers, and the printers likewise organized separate
national unions or alliances, and several other trades made tentative
efforts by correspondence to organize themselves in the same manner.

Before the dire year of 1837, there are, then, to be found
the beginnings of most of the elements of modern labor
organizations--benevolent societies and militant orders; political
activities and trades activities; amalgamations of local societies of
the same trades and of all trades; attempts at national organization on
the part of both the local trades' unions and of the local trade unions;
a labor press to keep alive the interest of the workman; mass meetings,
circulars, conventions, and appeals to arouse the interest of the public
in the issues of the hour. The persistent demand of the workingmen was
for a ten-hour day. Harriet Martineau, who traveled extensively thro