to
politics with an Equal Rights party. The laborers everywhere were
advocating organization and cooperation and strikes as a means to good
wages. In New York the laborers' union association had demanded a dollar
a day, made out a political program, which involved opposition to any
candidate who did not support the interests of workingmen. Sometimes the
militia had to be called out, as in 1846 when some Irish workers on a
strike were supplanted by Germans. Horace Greeley had naturally taken a
hand in this movement. It attracted the humanitarian mind. The
revolutionary processes in Europe of this year, the success of the
socialists in France, had a marked influence upon the conditions in
America. Meetings were held to congratulate the Chartists in England,
the followers of Louis Blanc in France. Strikes were on in Boston and
Philadelphia. I was caught in this world drift. I had a strike on my
building in Chicago.

I had left my affairs in the hands of an agent manager, who did not
assume authority to meet the terms of the strikers. Upon my return I was
obliged to settle it myself. I did this by promptly acceding to the
demands made upon me. What was a quarter of a dollar more a day to me? I
wanted my building to be finished.

One could not escape observing all this rebellion abroad and in America,
this awakening of the worker, this fight for human rights upon slavery
in the South, even if he did not have it brought to his mind in the
concrete way that I did. Slavery might be wrong, that was one thing; it
might cut into the rights, first or last, of the free worker; but if the
negro was owned in body and in energy, and his labor taken for nothing,
except the food, shelter, and clothing required to keep him efficient,
was that anything but just a matter of degree from the case of the white
man who was paid so much a day, enough to give him food, shelter, and
clothing, and thus keep him a fit machine? Thus there was a moral
sympathy between the white workers and the black workers; all were
making money for an upper man. If it was wrong to appropriate all the
black man's labor, it was wrong to appropriate too much of the white
man's labor. The Declaration of Independence was a hard nut to crack.
While only a few hare-brained agitators wanted negro equality, even
Douglas did not like slavery.

The new lands of the West brought fresh troubles to Douglas and
desperate struggles to the South. The emigration of revolutionaries