Thomas Skidmore
Thomas Skidmore was a notable labor reformer born in Newton, Connecticut, in 1791, as the eldest of ten children. Displaying remarkable intelligence, he became a teacher before turning thirteen but left home due to disputes over his earnings. Throughout his career, Skidmore held various teaching positions and engaged in chemical and mechanical research, particularly focusing on manufacturing improvements. His political involvement grew in New York, where he played a significant role in founding the Working Men's Party, advocating for the rights of laborers against extended work hours.
Skidmore's radical views highlighted the unequal distribution of property as a source of social issues, proposing a redistribution of wealth as a solution. His publication, "The Rights of Man to Property" (1829), reflected Enlightenment ideals and echoed thoughts of contemporary thinkers like Thomas Paine. Although his ideas faced opposition within the labor movement, they also contributed to later social reform movements, particularly land reform. Skidmore's life was cut short by the cholera epidemic in 1832, at the age of forty-one, but his legacy endures in discussions of labor rights and economic equality.
Subject Terms
Thomas Skidmore
- Thomas Skidmore
- Born: August 13, 1790
- Died: August 7, 1832
Labor reformer, was the eldest of ten children of John and Mary Skidmore of Newton, Connecticut, where he was born. A precocious youngster, Thomas Skidmore was appointed to teach at the district school before his thirteenth birthday, a position he held until he was eighteen. Angered that his father kept all his earnings, Skidmore decided to leave home, taking a teaching assignment in Weston, Connecticut. He left Weston after about a year because his uncle, with whom he was boarding, objected to the political articles he wrote.
Skidmore than held teaching positions in Princeton and Bordentown, New Jersey; Richmond, Virginia; and Edenton and Newburn, North Carolina. From 1815 to 1818 he did chemical and mechanical research in Wilmington, Delaware, attempting to improve the manufacture of gunpowder and paper. After a short stay in Philadelphia, he moved to New York. In 1821 he married Abigail Ball, the widow of Francis Ball.
Skidmore, who worked as an obscure machinist, played an important role in the founding of the Working Men’s party of New York. In April 1829 mechanics assembled to resist efforts by employers to lengthen the work day from ten to eleven hours. A Committee of Fifty formed to guide the movement endorsed Skidmore’s view that the unequal distribution of property was the cause of social evils and that a redistribution of property was the remedy. The new party nominated eleven candidates, including Skidmore, for the state assembly; one of the eleven was elected and Skidmore lost by a very narrow margin.
Skidmore’s Utopian vision and his concept of party organization aroused opposition. Rejecting his proposal for an all-powerful general committee, his opponents sought to decentralize power by establishing ward associations. When Skidmore rose to speak, his opponents shouted him down. Virtually read out of the party, Skidmore and a small number of loyal supporters organized a rival party, the Poor Man’s party. Skidmore continued to express his views in The Friends of Equal Rights, a short-lived newspaper that he published.
In The Rights of Man to Property (1829), Skidmore argued that “great wealth in few hands is always injurious to the well-being of a State.” His denunciation of private property resembled the theories of such thinkers as Thomas Paine and Robert Owen. In many ways Skidmore was a child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Like the French philosophes, he believed in the essential goodness of humanity and saw evil as a consequence of a faulty environment. Like them he attempted a rational analysis of society and held that society could be improved through rationally conceived reforms. Although Skidmore shared much in common with other social critics, his proposal to redistribute property was unique. “Let a new State Convention be assembled,” he urged. “Let it prepare a new Constitution, and let that Constitution … claim all property within the State. … Let it order an equal division of all this property among the citizens, of and over the age of maturity.”
Some historians have attributed to Skidmore a negative influence. His radical views on property, they assert, furnished the opposition with ammunition with which to attack the labor movement. Edward Pessen, however, believes that Skidmore has not been given sufficient credit. Skidmore’s views, says Pessen, helped to give rise to “the land reform movement of the 1840s and 1850s that played so great a role in winning passage of the Homestead Act during the Civil War. There is also a strong similarity between the thought and language of Skidmore in 1829 and that of Henry George, half a century later.”
Skidmore died during the cholera epidemic of 1832 at the comparatively young age of forty-one.
Skidmore’s chief publication was The Rights of Man to Property (1829). There is not much information available on his family background. Historians generally have relied on the series of articles in The New York Free Enquirer, March 30, April 6, April 13, 1834. For discussions of Skidmore’s career as a labor reformer, see W. Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class (1960); P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (1947); J. R. Commons, History of Labor in the United States, vol. 1 (1918); and two works by E. Pessen, “Thomas Skidmore, Agrarian Reformer in the Early American Labor Movement,” New York History, July 1954, and Most Uncommon Jacksonians (1967). The latter contains additional references. See also A. Whitman, Early American Labor Parties, 1822-1835 (1943).