Contesting "the Insatiable Maw of Capital": Mine Workers' Struggles in the Civil War Era

Abstract

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• Contesting "the Insatiable Maw of Capital"Mine Workers' Struggles in the Civil War Era
• Rosemary Feurer (bio)

In 1861, immigrant Illinois coal miners organized a union and issued a manifesto that called for the emancipation of labor North and South. They simultaneously organized to send troops to the front. By 1863, they established the first national miners' union in the United States, the American Miners Association (AMA). Mine operators launched a countermovement to destroy the union and contested miners' capacious vision of free labor. For that, they organized the state as a legitimate use of force and ushered in the Pinkertons as a private police force. By profiling Illinois miners and operators organizing during the Civil War era, this article adds to understanding the Civil War as a crucial period in working-class history.¹ The history of the AMA, left out of accounts of labor and Civil War histories of this era, shows a robust contest over the boundaries of free labor. These collective campaigns entwined with state-based rights campaigns for full citizenship for freed people.² Miner and operator class formation unfolded in relation to the Civil War and set the stage for postwar battles.

The miners' movement in this era started in the Belleville coalfield track, which comprised St. Clair and Madison Counties across from St. Louis, Missouri. This area produced two-thirds of the Illinois coal sold in the 1860s. Illinois [End Page 17] coal extraction started an uptick in the late 1850s, following the Illinois Central Railroad. Coal lay beneath almost two-thirds of Illinois, but in the American Bottom on the bluffs along the Mississippi, it was nearer to the surface. Laborers had dug and carted it since the 1840s. While Chicago's coal came from established fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1860, Belleville track coal fueled the developing industries in St. Louis, and those on the east side of the Mississippi. This led to sinking shafts just before the war. For that, coal operators hired miners from Great Britain, though with its seven-to-nine–foot-tall and dry seams, coal required less skill to extract. Among those who sought jobs were workers with union experience and with politically expansive ideas about the meaning of the war for workers.³

Belleville was a cosmopolitan German immigrant community fifteen miles from the Mississippi River border with Missouri. It was known as a freethinker's haven, "ein kleines deutsches Athen in Amerika," in one scholar's description. German exiles from revolutions and others repulsed by slavery in Missouri found a refuge there. West Belleville, where the mines were located, included abolitionists. It is possible that the miners' union movement leaders traveled to the area knowing this reputation. Belleville provided an important community base for mineworker unionism in the United States.⁴

The leading figures in the miners' union were politically aware immigrant activists who moved to the Belleville area. Three of them, Daniel Weaver, Thomas Lloyd, and Ralph Green, were from Staffordshire, England, which had been the seat of labor upheaval, influenced by Chartism. Staffordshire miners launched the General Strike of 1842, with working-class marches as long as seven miles, stopping in front of other mines, workshops, and factories—flying pickets, they were called—that appealed for solidarity as they advanced. These involved entire communities, including the unemployed, women and children, and grew to a half million workers across England and Wales. Observers such as Friedrich Engels thought the 1842 strike conveyed the potential of the working class as a force in history, though it was brutally repressed. The Miners Association, Britain's first national miners' union, became the strongest union in Great Britain in the aftermath until its demise in 1848.⁵ [End Page 18]

Weaver, an intellectual force behind the Belleville drive for union, was a young (twenty-one years old) miner when the 1842 general strike started in Tunstall, Staffordshire, where he likely lived. This was one place where miners were also leaders of the Chartist movement. Although we know little about his background, Weaver's writings as the first secretary of the miners' union in Belleville demonstrate that he had considered the potential role of the working class...