nment for debt. The Boston Prison Discipline
Society, a philanthropic organization, estimated in 1829 that about
75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United States.
Many of these were imprisoned for very small debts. In one Massachusetts
prison, for example, out of 37 cases, 20 were for less than $20. The
Philadelphia printer and philanthropist, Mathew Carey, father of the
economist Henry C. Carey, cited a contemporary Boston case of a blind
man with a family dependent on him imprisoned for a debt of six dollars.
A labor paper reported an astounding case of a widow in Providence,
Rhode Island, whose husband had lost his life in a fire while attempting
to save the property of the man who later caused her imprisonment for a
debt of 68 cents. The physical conditions in debtors' jails were
appalling, according to unimpeachable contemporary reports. Little did
such treatment of the poor accord with their newly acquired dignity as
citizens.

Another grievance, particularly exasperating because the government was
responsible, grew in Pennsylvania out of the administration of the
compulsory militia system. Service was obligatory upon all male citizens
and non-attendance was punished by fine or imprisonment. The rich
delinquent did not mind, but the poor delinquent when unable to pay was
given a jail sentence.

Other complaints by workingmen went back to the failure of government to
protect the poorer citizen's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness." The lack of a mechanic's lien law, which would protect his
wages in the case of his employer's bankruptcy, was keenly felt by the
workingmen. A labor paper estimated in 1829 that, owing to the lack of a
lien law on buildings, not less than three or four hundred thousand
dollars in wages were annually lost.

But the most distinctive demands of the workingmen went much further.
This was an age of egalitarianism. The Western frontiersmen demanded
equality with the wealthy Eastern merchant and banker, and found in
Andrew Jackson an ideal spokesman. For a brief moment it seemed that by
equality the workingmen meant an equal division of all property. That
was the program which received temporary endorsement at the first
workingmen's meeting in New York in April 1829. "Equal division" was
advocated by a self-taught mechanic by the name of Thomas Skidmore, who
elaborated his ideas in a book bearing the self-revealing title of "_The
Rights of Man to Prop