Seth Luther

• Seth Luther
• Born: 1795
• Died: April 29, 1863

Carpenter, self-taught lawyer, trade union organizer, orator and pamphleteer in the antebellum labor reform movement, was born in Rhode Island, the son of a veteran and pensioner of the Revolutionary War. As a youth Luther received, according to a partly autobiographical pamphlet titled “An Address on the Origin and Progress of Avarice” (1834), only a desultory education in common schools. He spent most of his time working in mills and learning carpentry. At age twenty-two Luther left New England and journeyed through Ohio and down the Mississippi. During his extensive travels Luther learned of social conditions on the frontier, among Indians, and among blacks in slave regions. His experience helped make him a devoted supporter of equal rights for every individual and a vigorous opponent of financial and political oligarchs.

When Luther returned to New England some fifteen years later about 1830, he found the area greatly different from the one he had left. Much of the New England economy was dedicated to industrial production, and much of its working population labored under a highly organized factory system that exploited them. Thirteen hour working days (“from sun to sun”) for both sexes were general, child labor was common and wages funded bare necessities only. Provision for education of children and self-improvement of adults barely existed, suffrage was limited to owners of property valued at a figure far above any amount a laborer might amass.

After his return Luther’s work as a carpenter in Rhode Island and Boston put him in direct contact with the conditions under which working people labored. According to one historian, Luther was inspired to join the nascent struggle for labor reform and “became a missionary to the workingmen”.

By 1831 a labor movement for reform of working conditions, directed particularly at a ten-hour day without wage reduction, burgeoned in such large cities as Philadelphia and Boston. In 1831 Luther participated in the organization of The New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen. He also became associated with Dr. Charles Douglas, another organizer, publisher in Rhode Island of The New England Artisan, later the official organ of the New England Association. Douglas appointed Luther the paper’s “traveling agent,” and in this role Luther traveled in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island speaking to labor groups, advocating the New England Association’s goal of a ten-hour day, stressing the need for solidarity among workers and recruiting members. Equally important, he began to write for The Artisan, explicating the view that workers should express their grievances in political and economic actions. He suggested that labor’s rights were sanctified by the democratic principles of the Revolution.

In spring of 1832 carpenters in Boston struck for a ten-hour day. Luther delivered an oration to the strikers that was enthusiastically received. Printed in Boston soon thereafter and distributed to workers in other cities, the speech, titled “An Address to the Working Men of New England,” secured Luther’s role as a spokesmen for the rights of all workers. According to labor historian Philip S. Foner, Luther’s address also enhanced his status as “the Tom Paine of the first labor movement”.

In keeping with the conventions of the day, Luther’s speech was studded with learned allusions—quite impressively for a man who lacked formal education—and bore a lengthy title: “An Address to the Working-Men of New England, on the State of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America. With Particular Reference to the Effect of Manufacturing (as Now Conducted) on the Health and Happiness of the Poor, and on the Safety of the Republic.” This title cites the issues and themes of Luther’s career as a labor reformer. Its salutation to “Working-Men” recognizes them as worthy of advocacy and representation in public assemblies. Stating concern for their “education” and “condition,” the address renames them, significantly, “Producing Classes,” distinguished from employers who merely consume the fruits of their labors. The title also identifies the interests of American workers and those in Europe, often set at odds by employers who sometimes stimulated European immigration with misleading promises of employment at higher wages to quell domestic labor agitation and control labor costs. The title indicates an attack on “Manufacturing (as Now Conducted)” for its destructive impact on workers, now recast as “the Poor,” but it does not by implication condemn manufacturing conducted under humane conditions. The title concludes by summoning a patriotic issue, “the Safety of the Republic,” suggesting employers may be guilty of transgressing the principles of freedom and equality stated in the Constitution.

Luther’s address accused large employers of “endeavoring… to cut down the wages of our own people” and of sending “agents to Europe, to induce foreigners to come here,” depriving Americans of employment and reducing their wages. The speech concludes by insisting that the cause of working people “is the cause of truth—of justice and humanity,” and warns workers not to be “deceived by… those who produce nothing. . . and enjoy all. . . while the Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal.” Luther’s address did not enable the Boston carpenter’s strike to succeed, but it did encourage trade union organization in Boston and other cities, not least because it recognized the role of women: “It is quite certain that unless we have the female sex on our side, we can not hope to accomplish any object we have in view.”

The New England Association passed a resolution thanking Luther for “his laborious efforts in collecting facts in relation to the abuses of the working classes and for his bold and manly defense of their rights.”

Luther conducted his work for labor reform in conjunction with a militant effort to extend the suffrage, especially in his home state of Rhode Island, where workers were completely disenfranchised by that state’s property qualification. He delivered speeches throughout the state after enlisting in a campaign for equal manhood suffrage, and in 1833 served on the Rhode Island Committee for the Extension of Suffrage. That year he published an “Address on the Right of Free Suffrage,” pleading for nonviolent resistance by the disenfranchised to tax collection and military service.

Luther’s appearances in lecture halls and at labor rallies apparently inspired respect. Tall and lanky, he was almost forty in 1832. He usually dressed in a green coat, filled a jaw with a cud of tobacco and carried with him the aura of a frontiersman. His oratorical power was great and his rhetoric has been described as “lurid… grim, sarcastic and highly colored.” A tireless traveler and speaker for his causes, Luther’s selfless dedication exhausted his health and left him impoverished.

In 1834 Luther helped organize the Boston Trades Union, whose members he represented as secretary. Boston carpenters, masons and stonecutters again struck for a ten-hour day in 1835. Luther helped to prepare and issue a circular stating the strikers’ demands and appealing for support. Though the strike failed, as had the earlier one, the circular helped later strikes to succeed.

According to Foner, “Wherever the Boston circular was studied, a strike developed for the ten-hour day.” A Philadelphia labor leader told Luther carpenters there “considered the Boston circular had broken their shackles, loosed their chains, and made them free from the galling yoke of excessive labor.”

The circular identified the strikers’ demand for a ten-hour day as patriotic. Asserting that employers exhausted workers’ “physical and mental powers” by requiring them to work excessive hours, the circular argued such requirements deprived workers of their responsibilities as citizens of the United States: “We have rights and duties to perform… which forbid us to dispose of more than ten hours for a day’s work.” Such rights and duties had been won in the American struggle for independence: “We claim by the blood of our fathers, shed on our battle fields in the war of Revolution, the rights of American citizens, and no earthly power shall resist our righteous claim with impunity.”

Luther continued his work for labor reform and suffrage throughout the 1830s, in part by supporting the left wing of the national Democratic party. In 1840 when the Rhode Island Suffrage Association organized, Luther volunteered his services. Some Suffrage Association members were sceptical of Luther’s value. Known as a radical carpenter with a fiery speaking sytle, Luther was described as “somewhat eccentric” in the Association’s official paper. Nevertheless the Association sponsored a speaking tour by him around the state. Then in 1842 a People’s Party wrote a new state constitution based on the principle of equal manhood suffrage to replace the existing one and submitted it for approval independently of the state legislature. After declaring the new constitution ratified, the People’s Party elected an entire new government under the leadership of Thomas Dorr. Soon thereafter an event that became known as Dorr’s Rebellion occurred. Thomas Dorr led an attack against a state arsenal with Luther at his side in the role of organizing secretary. Initial success was followed by a quick collapse. Luther was arrested, tried for treason, convicted and imprisoned. In 1843 he was released, pardoned by Rhode Island’s governor.

After his release Luther again committed himself to active participation in the labor reform movement. In 1846 he appears as a leader of a New Hampshire Ten Hour Conference. Past fifty, poor and broken in health at the outbreak of the Mexican War in May, 1848 Luther wrote to President James K. Polk volunteering for military service. No record of enlistment exists, but one month later records show Luther was admitted to a “lunatic asylum” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is presumed to have died soon thereafter.

Luther’s career of advocating workers’ rights to humane working conditions, fair wages and political equality was founded as much on personal experience as on theory. Luther’s sensitivity to the suffering of children forced to work long hours without hope of education is displayed in his extant addresses, as is his concern for adult women as well as men. His positions on labor reform represented an effort to relieve that suffering. But his work also represented an effort to recapture and institute the values of the Constitution that guaranteed every American basic freedoms. In his 1834 “Address on the Origin and Progress of Avarice,” he formulated a political and social program much in advance of his time by advocating the abolition of licensed monopolies, an end to capital punishment and imprisonment for debt, reform of the militia system, universal free public education and a free system of vocational schools. He also made it clear that workers were in basic conflict with the millowning system—a rudimantary statement of the class struggle theory of economic and political exploitation. Famous, controversial, even notorious during his lifetime, Luther’s career is little-known today but deserves to be, if only for the level of compassion and altruism it exhibits.

Though sources of information about Luther’s career are few and sometimes sketchy, good accounts are available in L. Hartz, “Seth Luther: The Story of a Working Class Rebel” New England Quarterly (Spring, 1940), S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States Volume I, (1962), and E. Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians (1967). See also A. M. Schlesinger Jr’s somewhat patronizing account in The Age of Jackson (1945). Luther’s “Address to the Workingmen …” is reprinted in Religion, Reform and Revolution: Labor Panaceas in the Nineteenth Century, edited by L. Stein (1970), and some of Luther’s works are available in the Library Company of Philadelphia. Brief accounts appear in Biographical Dictionary of American Labor Leaders, ed. Fink et al. (1974), and The Dictionary of American Biography.