William H. Sylvis

• William H. Sylvis
• Born: November 26, 1828
• Died: July 27, 1869

Was a major figure in the nineteenth-century labor movement. Through his efforts, the iron molders forged one of the nation’s strongest national unions after the Civil War and under his guidance joined other unions in the late 1860s to form the National Labor Union. Sylvis served as its leader until his sudden and early death.

William H. Sylvis was born in Armagh, Pennsylvania, to a family of modest means. He was the second of twelve children born to Nicholas Sylvis and Maria (Mott) Sylvis. Nicholas Sylvis, probably born in western Pennsylvania, was a wagonmaker by trade. The elder Sylvis, like many skilled workers of the antebellum era, vacillated between independent business and wage labor throughout his life. When the family wagon business failed in the 1837 panic, Nicholas Sylvis left home to go on the “tramp,” trying to find work wherever he could. Maria Sylvis, left with the family to support, indentured her son to the neighboring farm family of a state legislator. Young Sylvis worked out his five-year term as a farm laborer, acquiring a large dose of Whig politics from his master.

When Nicholas Sylvis reopened his wagon shop, he took his son into the trade. William Sylvis then became an apprentice iron molder and completed his training in a Curwensville, Pennsylvania, foundry in 1844. He thereupon took up the highly skilled specialty of stove and hollow-ware molding in which the worker forges objects out of molten iron.

During his early years as a journeyman iron molder, Sylvis followed his father’s tradition and tramped around western Pennsylvania, picking up jobs here and there. Sylvis continued to send his earnings back to his family until he arrived in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. There he met Amelia Thomas and, when she reached the age of fifteen in 1852, the two were married. Sylvis named their first son after his political hero, Henry Clay. In 1853 the family moved to Philadelphia, one of the centers of the nation’s iron-molding industry. The next three years were difficult times for them; among other things, Sylvis spilled molten iron into his boot and spent the better part of a year recovering from the accident.

In 1855 a second son, Oliver Perry, was born. The family continued to grow rapidly with a third son, Lewis Clark, born in 1857, and a fourth, John Martin, in 1859. During Sylvis’s period of recuperation after the foundry accident, he began a process of self-education in which he expanded his horizons to include consideration of the rights of workingmen in society.

By 1857 Sylvis was back at work with a newly sparked interest in labor questions. That year a strike in his foundry led him to join the two-year old Iron-Moulders’ International Union. Sylvis quickly rose to its leadership, becoming secretary only four months after joining. Within a year, in his capacity as secretary, he had initiated correspondence with molders’ locals in other parts of the country. The Iron-Moulders, along with the Machinists and Blacksmiths, were among the nation’s strongest craft unions before the Civil War. Yet even in these skilled trades, the concentration of industry and the pressure of a national market were beginning to have a harmful effect upon the workers. The molders faced a constant threat of declining wages and employer attacks on their union’s control over apprentices. By the late 1850s Sylvis clearly saw the need for a national union organization to combat the ever-increasing concentration of the industry.

As early as 1857 Sylvis began to agitate within the Iron-Moulders’ Union for a national strategy. Within two years he had successfully argued his case and in 1859 he organized the union’s first national convention. Thirty-five delegates from twelve local unions attended and within a year forty more locals were brought in. However, conditions within the trade were steadily worsening. Wage levels were jeopardized and molders across the country began to strike. By 1860 the number of walkouts was far beyond the ability of the fledgling national organization to support and finance, and Sylvis was forced to urge caution against “careless strikes.” In 1860 the national organization passed its first check on local strike activity by requiring approval before any aid could be sent.

The union’s momentum was abruptly lost with the onset of the Civil War. The war, combined with a continued decline in the trade, weakened molders’ locals and all but eliminated the national body. Sylvis, like many other workers, opposed slavery but had not joined the ranks of the abolitionists. As a Whig, he had admired the compromise politics of Henry Clay and turned his support to Stephen A. Douglas in the election of 1860.

Sylvis’s main interest in politics was in preserving peace and in maintaining the position of his union; believing that sectional differences and partisan conflict were largely responsible for the workers’ economic problems, he had no sympathy for the newly founded Republican party. Even after the Republican victory in 1860, Sylvis continued to advocate a peaceful compromise, and he was instrumental in the call for a national workingmen’s war-protest convention in 1861. The sessions, although not attended by as many as Sylvis had hoped, nevertheless represented an important segment of trade union opinion. Sylvis chaired the convention, assisted by other trade union leaders such as Uriah Stephens, founder of the Knights of Labor.

Once the conflict had begun, however, Sylvis abandoned his opposition, and in his ardor to preserve the Union enlisted for military duty. He saw only a brief army term and shortly returned to his trade union efforts. The war years brought personal tragedy for Sylvis when Amelia Sylvis died in 1864. Left with four young sons, he married another Hollidaysburg woman, Florrie Hunter, in 1866, and within a year they had a son, Casper Dent.

As the Civil War reached its closing months, strikes again became common. Tired of the sacrifices of the war years and witness to the tremendous wartime profits made by their employers, many workers began to demand higher pay for themselves. In 1864 a major Philadelphia molders’ strike clearly defined the issues that would confront William Sylvis and the trade union movement in the postwar years. In addition to threatening a wage cut, the iron manufacturers attacked the molders’ union at its most basic level, its apprenticeship system. As in any skilled work, the molders exercised a great deal of control in their industry by limiting entry into the trade and by insisting on training apprentices. In 1864 the manufacturers threatened to take this function out of the hands of the workingmen and to bypass the union’s tradition of control. Through a bitter two-year strike led by Sylvis, the molders ultimately lost their battle. However, the union’s defeat proved a pyrrhic victory for the employers, who were swamped with untrained laborers.

After the strike, Sylvis began traveling around the major iron-molding areas in a campaign to rebuild the union. His tour included the molders’ old stronghold of Troy, New York, as well as St. Louis and Cincinnati. Within a year his efforts were rewarded and membership in the union almost doubled. In 1865 Sylvis, now a nationally known figure in the iron industry, became the first president of a fast-growing, revitalized national organization. He measured the union’s strength not so much in terms of increased membership as in the renewed control that molders were able to exert over their craft. In many foundries molders once again were able to insist on a closed shop and the enforcement of apprenticeship rules.

During the next two years Sylvis transformed the molders’ union into a cohesive, well-administered organization. He was largely responsible for infusing the union with a well-defined central leadership that controlled policy and enforced discipline among the many local bodies. In his own strong personality he represented the firm central leadership he knew the union needed.

To ensure communication within the union, Sylvis established the Iron-Moulders’ Journal, and through its pages Sylvis and other leaders articulated a wide reform interest that included shorter hours, monetary reform, tenement-house reform, and temperance. Sylvis also expressed a strong interest in the cooperative movement. He felt that only through producers’ cooperatives and independent labor politics could workers solve their problems. At one point, the idea of cooperation became so popular among iron molders that the union changed its name to the Iron Moulders’ International and Protective Cooperative Union and experimented with cooperative production in several areas. Unfortunately, like many of their contemporaries who undertook cooperative ventures, the molders could not compete in the growing national market and were soon forced to abandon their efforts.

Sylvis’s experience as the head of the molders’ growing national organization, combined with the failure of the union’s cooperative endeavors, led him to see the need for a national organization that would encompass all trades. In 1867 Sylvis, along with leaders from other unions, called the first National Labor Congress, which became the National Labor Union (NLU); in 1868 he became its first president.

Within the NLU Sylvis acted on his commitment to include both black and female workers under the banner of labor organization. He favored seating Susan B. Anthony at the NLU’s convention and supported Kate Mullaney of the Troy, New York, Collar Laundry Union as secretary of the assembly. Like many unionists of the period, Sylvis viewed women and blacks as competitors in the labor market and believed that if the labor movement did not include these low-paid workers in its ranks, they would be used to drive the general level of wages down and destroy the labor movement. In pursuit of his broad goals for the movement, Sylvis encouraged the NLU to establish the first permanent labor lobby in Washington and pushed for the formation of a federal department of labor.

Sylvis’s vision extended beyond domestic concerns and by the end of his life led him to articulate an international perspective for American labor. He was among the first American labor leaders to seek contact with Karl Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association. Shortly before his death he corresponded with the leaders of the European movement, writing, “Our cause is a common one.”

William H. Sylvis died suddenly at the age of forty, just one year after assuming the leadership of the National Labor Union. The organization never realized the potential hoped for by the founder, but slowly foundered on craft rivalries and the growing strength of employer organizations. Trade unionists and reformers from all over the country attended Sylvis’s funeral, along with friends from his temperance lodge and local Philadelphia workingmen’s societies.

Sylvis’s interests had ranged widely, from temperance and cold-water cures to monetary reforms and the Methodist church, in which he took an active role. Within the labor movement, Sylvis is remembered not only as the founder of the first national trade union organization but also as the farsighted architect of a strong union structure and modern organization for the iron molders.

Sylvis’s own writings were collected by his brother: J. C. Sylvis, The Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis (1872). For biographical information on Sylvis see J. Grossman, William Sylvis, Pioneer of American Labor: A Study of the Labor Movement During the Era of the Civil War (1945), and D. Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967). For material on Sylvis’s labor and political activities see Grossman; Montgomery; J. R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. 2 (1918); F. T. Stockton, The International Molders Union of North America (1921); C. Todes, William Sylvis and the National Labor Union (1942); and P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (1947). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936).