"And as man’s life is made up of days & hours, & his History of trifling incidents, so shall this Epistle be a thing of incidents; for were I with you I should relate the very same by word of mouth, why not in absence by deed of pen?"

SO WROTE DANIEL SPENCER GILMAN in Lowell to his younger brother on an Eastern Townships farm near the Vermont border in early July 1847. Gilman’s letters provide an interesting view of life in Lowell, Massachusetts during the 1840s, but, more importantly, they reflect the thoughts and experiences of a working man in the early industrial era. This perspective is remarkably rare in published works despite the large amount of historical research on labour history, including working-class culture. The reason is that for males in particular the focus of historians has been on the workplace, especially on the conflict with capital as skilled workers reacted to the threats posed by mechanization and the ruthless competition for markets. Studies of women wage workers, such as that by Thomas Dublin on Lowell itself, often provide a broader understanding of their everyday lives. ¹ More recently, gender historians have begun to examine American manhood and masculinity in the Victorian era, but the focus to date has been heavily on the white middle class. ²

      As America’s first industrial city, Lowell has attracted a good deal of attention from historians. They have suggested that the Boston-based companies which established the town’s textile factories recruited young female workers from the villages and farms of the region not only to obtain a cheap labour force, but also because they shared the Jeffersonian fear of reproducing an industrial proletariat in the United States. The captains of industry implemented paternalistic policies to alleviate these fears by recreating communities in which factory labour would be a temporary stage of life, and corporate hierarchy and deference would be valued. ³

      Despite the large amount of time spent in the workplace, averaging nearly twelve hours a day, six days a week, for more than three hundred days a year, many of the early factory operatives did take advantage of the opportunities provided to "improve themselves" morally and intellectually. They attended night classes and Lyceum lectures on a wide variety of topics, joined the temperance society, and even wrote for their own journal, the Lowell Offering. ⁴ While the young women worked at repetitive tasks in a noisy, humid, and dust-filled environment, they generally approached factory labour as a welcome transition between dependency on father and dependency on husband. In Thomas Bender’s words, "the contrast with Manchester, England, apparently was so sharp that the New England mill girls were celebrated throughout Europe and America for their intelligence and virtue." ⁵

      But increasing competition and mechanization led to a deterioration in working and living conditions during the 1840s, just as the influx of impoverished families fleeing the Irish potato famine brought a ready supply of more easily exploitable labour. When the companies introduced faster machines, more machines per worker, lower piece rates, and premiums for more productive overseers, the operatives began to petition and march in protest. They focused their demands on the ten hour work day, but the more radical among them criticized the factory system itself in the labour newspaper, The Voice of Industry. With the failure of their campaign by mid-century, most American-born women simply abandoned the Lowell factories to a proletariat of refugees from the Irish famine. They, in turn, would be followed by successive waves of French Canadians, Poles, Greeks, and others. ⁶

      Partly because of their literacy, the American female operatives have been a popular subject for researchers wishing to gain insights into the early industrial experience. Historians of Lowell’s "golden age" have found the young women’s voices not only in the contemporary press and periodicals but in their diaries, memoirs, and letters, a number of  which have been published. ⁷ But largely missing from the picture are the male workers who constructed the canals, factories, rows of company boarding houses, and private dwellings of the managers and married workers, not to mention the men who worked in the "wadding and batting mills, machine shops, dye houses, screw-bolt factories, card factories, bobbin and shuttle factories, bedstead factories," and other Lowell industries. ⁸ Recently, historians have begun to examine the marginalized Irish community which built much of Lowell’s infrastructure, but the North American born male workers remain largely invisible. ⁹

      Read in the context of the rich studies now available on his female contemporaries in Lowell, the 39 surviving letters and two fragments written by Daniel Spencer Gilman to his Canadian family members between 1840 and 1849 provide useful insights into the meanings of class and gender in this crucial era of economic and social transition. Finally, from the Canadian perspective, Gilman’s correspondence reveals that migration from Lower Canada to the New England mill towns began earlier than suggested by previous studies, largely because historians have focused on the more permanent family emigration of the French Canadians which began in the later 1850s. ¹⁰ While only 3.4 per cent of Lowell’s population was Canadian born in 1850, it is clear that a much larger number of Canadians had sojourned in the the city during the previous decade for Gilman refers to a steady flow of young men and women back and forth from his home area alone. ¹¹

      These letters also reveal how important kin and community ties were in the search for employment in the new environment, with Gilman’s uncle and other entrepreneurs providing initial employment to young men from their Canadian homeland, just as older French Canadian settlers acted as informal "agents" in introducing newcomers to industrial life in Lewiston, Maine. ¹² Finally, Gilman’s letters demonstrate how effectively the communications network of the time kept rural Canadians in touch with the economic, social, cultural, and political developments in the cradle of American industrialization. In fact, Spencer Gilman’s enthusiastic descriptions of the many colourful parades in Lowell, the beautiful young factory girls, and his rail trips to Boston and other cities were clearly a strong enticement to at least one of his brothers.

Daniel Spencer Gilman, whom family memory recall as Spencer, was born the eldest of seven children in 1816 and grew up on a farm in Brome Township, in what was then the colony of Lower Canada. ¹³ While the seigneuries of the St. Lawrence Valley and its major tributaries had remained largely French speaking after the British Conquest of 1763, American settlers were the first to enter the northern Appalachian territory that had acted as a buffer zone between the settlements of New England and New France. Surveyed into townships of roughly ten miles squared in the early 1790s, this region of freehold tenure became unofficially known as the Eastern Townships. ¹⁴ Brome Township’s first settlers arrived in the late 18th century, and the official census reports reveal that by 1844 the largely rural population had reached 1,771, climbing to 2,095 by 1851. ¹⁵ Nearly all these inhabitants were of American origin.  

      Prior to moving to Brome in 1802 with his family from Canaan in south-central New Hampshire, Spencer Gilman’s paternal grandfather had been an innkeeper and a soldier in the Revolutionary army. ¹⁶ The family must have prospered in Lower Canada, for in 1811 Spencer’s father, Moses, purchased a 100 acre farm for the considerable sum of £87 10s in cash. ¹⁷ Spencer’s mother, Patience Spencer, was also the daughter of a local pioneer.

      Like many families in the Eastern Townships, the Gilmans maintained contact with their extensive network of American relations as late as the 1840s. ¹⁸ As a northern extension of the New England settlement frontier, the region had remained socially and culturally isolated from the rest of Lower Canada. British influence manifested itself through the missionary efforts of the Church of England and the Wesleyan Methodists, but American teachers and text books continued to dominate the school system until the  outbreak of the Rebellion of 1837. During the following decade, the process of modern state formation and railway construction began to integrate the Eastern Townships more effectively into the Province of Canada, but industrialization of the region had barely begun and the trains ran not only to Montréal and Québec but also to Portland and Boston. ¹⁹ The desire for access to American markets, coupled with the fear of French Canadian political domination, caused a brief but fervent outburst of American annexationism in 1849-1850. ²⁰ By this time, however, Spencer Gilman and many like him had already moved to the United States.

      Despite Gilman’s rural Canadian background, his letters suggest that he felt quite at home in Lowell, a town of 21,000 where ten major firms employed 8,000 workers in 32 large mills when he arrived at the age of 24 in 1840. ²¹ Lowell was still a four day trip from Brome by stage and train in 1843, but, like most of the female factory operatives, Gilman was able to enter an extended-kin network. ²² He joined the household of an entrepreneurial uncle, and took a lively interest in American politics, writing letters to the local press critical of protective tariffs as well as company labour policy. ²³

      In contrast to the rapid industrialization and increases in real wages in the northeastern United States during the 1840s, these were difficult years for the Lower Canadian economy. Wheat rust was followed by potato blight, and the termination of British preferential tariffs for the important square timber and wheat trade. ²⁴ But Gilman’s motives for remaining in Lowell were not entirely materialistic. He made it clear as early as 1840 that he considered the wages to be low, and he clearly felt no compulsion to send money home to his family. The same was true of most female workers, but many of them were accumulating dowries for their marriages, which generally followed two or three years of wage labour. ²⁵ Gilman had abandoned a farm in Brome, and he carefully avoided marital commitment throughout the decade. His letters suggest that he remained in Lowell as long as he did quite simply because he preferred living there to farming in the Eastern Townships, and he soon came to identify himself as a proud American.

      Gilman did write faithfully, if infrequently, during his nine year residence in Lowell (with brief intervals in Suncook and Manchester, New Hampshire), and he visited his family several times. But he also criticized his cousins for falling victim to homesickness and abandoning secure jobs in Lowell, and when he finally left the economically depressed city in 1849, it was not to go home but to join many of his fellow workers in the gold rush to California. ²⁶ His last letter describes his gold-mining experience in detail, including how–alone and unarmed–he carried $1,300 in diggings to safety in the town of Stockton. Family legend claims that Gilman remained in California, only to fall victim three or four years later to the typhus that had once nearly killed him in Lowell. ²⁷

      Gilman’s letters provide a valuable record by an articulate and sharp-eyed observer of life in a burgeoning American textile town. On 1 March 1840, for example, he noted that a Universalist minister had addressed over a thousand listeners a night for three consecutive nights in opposition to William Miller’s theory that the apocalypse would arrive shortly. ²⁸ On 21 August 1842, in his often ironic style, he mentioned joining a club of "gentlemen" from the three companies "for mutual improvement by Debate, Declamation & the writing of Anonymous Communications." And, on 14 July 1844, he described "the grand display of beauty in shape of Factory Girls to the number of 1000 belonging to the Martha Washington Temperance Society who paraded our Streets in uniform wearing badges etc, their uniform was a white dress, lace cap, no bonnets but parasols & a silk girdle or belt bearing the name Martha Washington." ²⁹

      Though Gilman’s letters are more descriptive than introspective, their main value lies as a window into the thoughts and aspirations of a young male worker in an early industrial town. Gilman’s chief characteristic was his desire for independence, a trait more often associated with the western frontier than the eastern industrial environment, but which may nonetheless have characterized the large numbers of transient young men of the middle years of the 19th century identified by quantitative historians such as Michael Katz and David Gagan. ³⁰ Gilman’s letters help us to appreciate that these individuals were more than shadowy figures on a manuscript census page, or part of an undifferentiated mass in the workplace.

The concept of a working-class identity is a slippery one, and nowhere more so than in the North American context at the dawn of industrial capitalism. The young women and men who flocked from farms and villages to factory towns such as Lowell did not change their identities or values overnight, nor did they necessarily lose control over their means of production for the rest of their lives. As a Canadian-born male with a taste for learning and adventure, Spencer Gilman may not have been the typical Lowell labourer of the 1840s, but it is well known that many female operatives shared these same interests and ambitions. For a time during the mid-forties, radical class-based politics would provide Gilman and many of the young factory women with an ideology that reconciled the basic conflict they felt between modernity and tradition. ³¹ But with the failure of this campaign, and his acquisition of woodworking skills, Gilman became more independent and restless, finally seizing eagerly on the promise of adventure and riches in California. Like the female operatives, Gilman was a transitional figure, never entirely at ease in Lowell but determined not to return to the restrictive life he had left behind.

      Many of the male labourers of Lowell who were not Irish immigrants likely shared the social background of the female factory operatives and Spencer Gilman himself. At the time Spencer left for Lowell, his father, Moses, was a farmer of rather modest means. The senior Gilman reported to the 1842 census enumerator that he had improved thirty of his one hundred acres, and owned only six cattle, two horses, nine sheep, and three pigs. When Spencer’s youngest sister married the son of an Anglican clergyman in 1852, the Reverend James Reid noted in his diary: "We drove up to Mr Gilman’s, Martha’s father, and there dined. They are plain farmer folks, and appear to have plenty. I like the looks of the mother very much, Squire Gilman himself is a great talker, and does not appear to have much of the pride of dress, but is a good sensible man." ³²

	"Boott Cotton Mills." Courtesy of the Lowell Historical Society.

      Moses Gilman had purchased two farm lots in 1836 and 1837, presumably for his sons Spencer and Roswell, but this traditional method of paternal control failed to hold Spencer for very long. Roswell, in contrast, remained on his farm until his father died in 1864. ³³ The Gilmans continued to operate Spencer’s farm for him for a time after 1840, but they must have realized where his heart truly lay when they read the following in a letter of 8 February 1841: "Tell Father if he cannot conveniently store the Buckwheat to feed it out to the pigs. I have just purchased a work written by George Comb on the constitution of man which I think very interesting & instructive [...]." ³⁴

      As had many of the female operatives, Spencer Gilman taught school for a year or so, and he counselled his brother on 19 October 1844 as follows: "Write often & give free scope to thought & feeling let the subject be what it may. By doing so you train the mind to express itself in a free & easy manner, & also lay the foundation for a regular & systematic course of thinking & of reasoning." ³⁵ Gilman also regularly sent home a variety of newspapers from Lowell, but he was no intellectual despite his wide-ranging curiosity, and he never expressed an interest in more formal education.

      Gilman’s background was not working-class, insofar as farmers owned their own means of production, and his letters reveal that several uncles were successful New England businessmen. But the fact remained that Spencer’s own family was of very ordinary circumstances, and Reverend Reid accepted the marriage alliance with the Gilmans only because his son had decided to become a farmer himself: "A farmer’s daughter in his own vicinity who knows well what kind of home he is bringing her to–who sees what she has to expect, & cannot naturally look for any thing different from, or much better than what she was used to, is more likely to [...] exert herself to make it a comfortable home." ³⁶

      Spencer began working in Lowell as a yard hand before serving off and on as a watchman for the Massachusetts Corporation. He also learned the mechanic’s (carpenter’s) trade from his contractor uncle, went into business briefly as a carter,  and experimented in photography, going so far as to lecture and publish a manual on the subject. Such frequent changes in occupation were commonplace in mid-19th-century North American cities, making it impossible to establish rigid socio-economic categories. But even though Gilman did move from the ranks of the unskilled wage-earners to independent artisanship by the later 1840s, his roles as self-employed carter and photographer would hardly elevate him to the middle class.

      Kin ties could nevertheless alleviate class distinctions, While in Lowell, Spencer Gilman lived most of the time in the respectable petit-bourgeois household of his uncle, Tristram Coffin Gilman, who was listed as a housewright, and later a carpenter, in the city directories of the 1840s. Spencer also used his spare cash to speculate in the shares of a local railway company, and took time off to visit the historic battlefield of Concord and to attend the theater in Boston. Taking a strong interest in politics, Gilman expressed decided opinions on national leaders such as President John Tyler and Senator Daniel Webster, and he belonged to a debating club as well as attending lectures at the Lowell Institute.

      But Gilman expressed little interest in religion at a time when, according to Mary Ryan, a middle-class identity was emerging from the religious revivalism fueled by "young men and women from farm, artisan, and shopkeeping families who were struggling to find a comfortable place for themselves within a changing social and economic structure." ³⁷ Instead, Gilman was attracted to the current "scientific" crazes of phrenology and "mesmerism." ³⁸ And while he was a faithful temperance supporter, going so far as to abstain from tea and coffee at one point, Gilman (like the majority in his cotton-dependent town) remained indifferent to the era’s other major social reform movement, the abolition of slavery. ³⁹ Indeed, Gilman’s liberalism did not extend to "race" or ethnicity in general. Far from feeling a sense of solidarity with the Irish workers of Lowell, for example, he described their violent behaviour in debasingly stereotypical terms meant to amuse his family.

      The writings of Lowell’s female factory operatives indicate that a number of them held similar prejudices, suggesting that a widespread resentment against the threat of Irish cheap labour, drunkenness, and violence may have helped to strengthen a common sense of identity and purpose among American-born male and female workers. ⁴⁰ Gilman corresponds in many respects to Alan Dawley’s and Paul Faler’s definition of the "new person among the laboring classes of Europe and America [...] one who put his/her needs ahead of the demands of kin and community, who acknowledged no master but the self, and who located the virtues of self-control, self-denial, and self-improvement at the center of the moral universe." Like their employers, these "modernists" shunned those things the "traditionalists" cherished – "the warm sociability of the drinking club, the ‘wasteful’ amusement of the circus and Jim Crow show, the easygoing work rhythm." ⁴¹

      But the Dawley-Faler typology is not particularly helpful in Gilman’s case, for he also remained in certain respects a traditionalist, with his rather casual approach towards work and his ongoing attachment to a family-and-community network. Even allowing for his relative youth, Gilman had a less ambitious outlook on life than the stereotypical aspirant to middle-class status. ⁴² While he warned his brother that no one should come to Lowell who was not willing to work hard, he saw labour as a necessary evil and admitted that he was enjoying himself more for having given up all thoughts of accumulating property: "My motto is live today & let the morrow take care of itself." ⁴³ Gilman carefully noted the arrival of circuses in Lowell, and his attendance at the theater was no reflection of middle-class pretensions since it appealed to a broad social spectrum, blending Shakespearean drama, popular farces, and novelty acts. ⁴⁴

      Nor was Gilman’s attitude towards the stage lectures that were part of the thriving self-improvement movement always a serious one. He wrote with tongue firmly in cheek on 14 July 1844:

We have every thing that can be thought of in shape of Concerts, Lectures, etc. We have Lectures to Gentlemen where Ladies & Children are not admitted. And Lectures to Ladies[,] Corset and Anticorset Lectures, Temperance Lecture [s,] Antislavery Lectures. Also Mnemonics, a bran [?] new Science. In short we have humbuggery in ten thousand forms, which we Yankee’s (noted for Gullibility) eagerly swallow without once stopping to taste.

As Martin Hewett has argued for Saint John, New Brunswick, "science became just one element [...] developed in the 1830s and 1840s, during which time the traditional motifs of the rational recreation ideal were appropriated and diluted by a wide spectrum of entertainments." ⁴⁵ In that town, at least, the carnivalesque demonstrations of phrenology and mesmerism were resisted by the conservative scientific establishment. ⁴⁶

      Gilman was therefore very much a part of the popular classes in Lowell, even if he was able to resist proletarianization to a considerable degree. Indeed, had he lived long enough, Gilman might possibly have become a successful artisan or entrepreneur in California. Rather than squandering the small fortune he made mining gold, he planned to work as a carpenter during his first winter in San Francisco. But Gilman’s upward mobility was probably not so uncommon in this age of opportunity, nor was there a necessary contradiction between his aspiration to respectability and his working-class status. As Peter Bailey has pointed out, workers could adopt "the rhetoric of progress and self-culture" while sustaining "an independent radical critique of capital and its values." ⁴⁷

      Having grown up on a farm adjacent to the estate of General Roswell Olcott, son of the former Lieutenant-Governor of Vermont and reputed owner of several slaves, Gilman could not avoid being aware of class distinctions even before he left Brome Township. ⁴⁸ He was also strongly influenced by his experience in Lowell. Rather than joining the middle-class Rechabite temperance association to which his Uncle Tristram belonged, Gilman became a member of the more plebeian Washingtonians. According to Teresa Murphy, this anti-institutional organization influenced the labour movement by giving workingmen a new sense of moral authority. ⁴⁹ In any case, Gilman did not remain a rigid teetotaller, for in 1849 he noted that while on board ship "A little Brandy, Gin, Wine, etc. not objectionable to a Temperance man." ⁵⁰ Gilman also mocked his ambitious uncle’s fruitless quest for a patronage post, and, after describing a local fire, commented that it had "done no harm merely burning down the stately mansion in which an aristocratic & arbitrary old lawyer resided." ⁵¹ In another letter Gilman began as follows a humorous poem inspired by a lady’s request to know his mother’s maiden name:

Why ask my mother’s Maiden name?

As though it were a thing of Fame.

As though proved titles grac’d her birth;

Which are at best of trivial worth. ⁵²

      Even Gilman’s support for the elite-led Democrats was not inconsistent with a radical political stance, for the Whigs controlled the city of Lowell in the interests of the mill owners. ⁵³ Furthermore, Sean Wilentz argues that the Democrats appealed, "in general, to those who felt cut off from or injured by the continuing transformation of market relations." ⁵⁴ In 1843 Gilman referred to his workplace, the Massachusetts Yard, as Monkey Hollow because of the social-climbing ambitions of the Whig overseer and several fellow-watchmen. The watchmen’s capture of a raccoon inspired Gilman to send satirical letters to a local Democrat newspaper using this symbol of the old Whig party as his pseudonym. One of these letters began:

The petitioner your humble prisoner respectfully represents, That in the year 1842, I was induced by false representations and perfidious promises of some of your species who assumed the name of coon, to leave the quiet and peaceful hills of the Granite State, to come to this city and live upon corporation patronage under the special contract of two dollars a day and roast beef.

That on [...] entering upon my official duties the persons I found there had every appearance of being coons and such of them as were kept in abject servitude retained for a long time that appearance, but the officers were possessed of a more restless disposition, and made frequent efforts to climb which gave them an ape-like appearance, but the more they attempted it the more they showed themselves up to be monkeys. ⁵⁵

      Gilman harboured a particular enmity for the "Great & Godlike" Daniel Webster, noting his "natural propensity to fawn upon, & cringe under those enjoying wealth & power." ⁵⁶ Certainly not obsequious himself, Gilman was dismissed from his job as watchman in 1843 because he had publicly criticized the company for reducing wages and board allowance. Nor did Gilman share the Whig senator’s well-known enthusiasm for the industrial revolution, at least as it was unfolding in Lowell, for in 1844 he joined his fellow workers, including the female factory operatives, in the agitation for shorter hours. ⁵⁷

      Gilman’s surviving letters unfortunately do not detail his activities in the labour movement, but they do note his membership in the Mechanics’ and Laborers’ Association of Lowell, which he defined as a society "for the purpose of ameliorating the condition of the laboring portion of [the]Community, by reducing the hours of toil per day, & placing the laborer on an equal footing with the Capitalist. Believing that the present system & arrangement of Society is decidedly wrong & also believing that by the present system of labor, the producing classes of this Country are fast hastening to the wretched condition of the laboring classes of Europe." ⁵⁸

      Gilman also mentioned writing articles for the association’s weekly newspaper, The Operative, and in October 1844 he attended the founding convention in Boston of the New England Workingmen’s Association. ⁵⁹ Two years later he marched in the 4 July parade with the reorganized and renamed Labor Reform League. ⁶⁰ There is no evidence that Gilman supported Associationism (Fourierism) or National Land Reform, two utopian movements whose principles were part of the labour-reform platform, but his radical rhetoric certainly suggests a strong commitment to fundamental reform. ⁶¹

      Reflecting the orthodox Marxist position, Bruce Laurie remains critical of what he terms the Christian labourism propounded by the New England Workingmen’s Association and the Female Labor Reform Association, with their promotion of the petition over the strike. ⁶² Teresa Murphy argues, however, that labour reform’s appropriation of the stereotypes and discourse of middle-class reformers during the 1840s "represented a challenge rather than a capitulation to middle-class control of community morals," particularly "the emerging bourgeois distinction between the amorality of the marketplace and moral universe of private behavior." ⁶³ As for tactics, Murphy adds that petitioning was simply "a different form of self-assertion" than the strike, one "which more effectively accommodated the differences of the region as the struggle for a ten-hour day moved from conflict at the workplace to conflict within the community, and as women joined men in a broad coalition." ⁶⁴

      David Zonderman’s perspective, which lies between these two extremes, is perhaps most helpful. He essentially agrees with Laurie that "by continuing to present petitions concerning the hours of labour instead of taking more direct action against the factory system," the workers "reaffirmed the basic structures of the industrial economy and American politics, whether they all intended to or not." Yet, he also argues that by demanding shorter working days workers aimed to gain more time "to attend to their health, families, education, religion, culture, and the duties of citizenship," as well as to provide themselves with the opportunity "to learn why it was necessary to redesign the factory system and the social structure" in order to preserve the shared republican heritage of equal rights. The question became one of workers’ control, not by seizing the means of production, but by assuming the power to prevent overwork and exploitation. ⁶⁵

      In short, Gilman and the other Lowell activists of the early to mid-1840s were Jacksonians who emphasized the need "to preserve each worker’s independence as a person." ⁶⁶ But they also clearly believed there was a deep-rooted conflict in society between the producing and non-producing classes, and that government could and should curb the moral irresponsibility of the corporation. Otherwise, the degradation of labour would undermine all republican institutions as well as society itself. ⁶⁷ Paradoxical as it might seem, Gilman’s antipathy to abolitionism also reflected the current Jacksonian concern that this movement would divert attention from the vital economic questions of the day. ⁶⁸  

      The defeat of Jacksonianism, like the defeat of the struggle for worker control in New England’s textile towns, ended the idealistic faith in political reform and gave rise to the assumption that "workingmen’s interests were primarily bound up with their position as economic agents, as ‘laboring men’." ⁶⁹ Women, who had never been seen as long-term workers, were clearly excluded. Fortunately for Gilman and many of the other rural-origin workers in Lowell and its neighbouring textile towns, when they faced the victory of the conservative political forces in Washington, and the onslaught of cheap immigrant labour in their workplaces, they were able to make an independent living elsewhere rather than accept lower wages and poorer working conditions. With the failure of the shorter hours movement and Gilman’s break from dependency on the local corporations, his letters no longer referred to the evils of the industrial system. But he had also broken from the security of working for his uncle with its possibilities of a business partnership, and he now plied his trade in various localities until heading for the next frontier, a place where he would not have to join an established bourgeoisie in order to have a chance to become prosperous.

      In the final analysis, the question of whether or not Spencer Gilman strictly belonged to the working-class is ahistorical because capitalist forms and class formations were in flux during his era, and social historians have now largely rejected what Sean Wilentz terms the essentialist concept of class consciousness. Wilentz argues that, rather than attempting to see how clearly the past approximated an ideal, historians should examine how class consciousness emerged as "workers and radicals elaborated a notion of labor as a form of personal property, in direct opposition to capitalist conceptions of wage labor as a market commodity." ⁷⁰ But Gilman clearly identified himself as a member of the producing classes, and his trajectory reminds us that labour unions, political parties, and social movements were not the only forms of resistance to class exploitation, particularly as long as the frontier remained open. ⁷¹ It was no accident that Jacksonians regarded the western frontier as the best check against economic oppression. ⁷² If Gilman’s attitudes toward society and his place in it seem somewhat contradictory in the eyes of modern readers, he himself appears to have had quite a clear and confident sense of his identity in the new world that was unfolding before him.

While social and cultural historians have helped to construct the concept of class identity, they have more recently begun to deconstruct that of gender identity. But, despite repeated calls for a gendered analysis of class formation, ⁷³ relatively little work has been done on the gender values and attitudes of the working-class male. ⁷⁴ The path-breaking books on American manhood by Anthony Rotundo and Michael Kimmel focus on the middle class largely because it is easier to find letters, diaries, and memoirs, as well as recorded speeches and various kinds of advice literature, produced by and for this sector of society. ⁷⁵

      But given that the unmarried male workers who grew up in the close-knit rural and small-town communities of the north eastern United States and Canada were not only remarkably mobile geographically, but almost universally literate, it is rather difficult to believe that few of them followed the example of their female counterparts by writing letters home to their parental families and friends. The fact that Gilman’s letters have been largely ignored by historians despite their long-time availability in a public archives suggests that historians themselves have been somewhat blinded by the stereotype of the inarticulate male worker. ⁷⁶

      While Spencer Gilman’s letters certainly do not speak for an entire social stratum, they do provide one of the first opportunities to compare the outlook of a young working man with the findings of Rotundo and Kimmel for middle-class males at the same stage of life during the antebellum era. One might expect to find quite a different set of values, for John Tosh has cautioned against assuming that the working class shared "[t]he dominant code of Victorian manliness, with its emphasis on self-control, hard work and independence." ⁷⁷ But, perhaps because of his rural background, Gilman followed these very principles to a considerable degree even while lacking much desire to join the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie. At this stage of his life the young Lowell worker had clearly not adopted the middle-class belief that a man’s occupation "was an authentic expression of his individuality." ⁷⁸ He nevertheless avoided factory work, which he claimed was too confining to suit him, but perhaps also because, in Zonderman’s words, "it ran counter to the American mythology of manly, independent producer." ⁷⁹ While the rhetoric of the first American workingmen’s political parties equated all economic dependence on wages with emasculation, the work Gilman chose at least freed him from the dictates of a machine. ⁸⁰

      Gilman’s gender-based experiences, including the channeling of his youthful energy into debating clubs and other self-improvement associations, were quite similar to those described by Rotundo, which suggests that there may have been a broadly-shared idea of what it meant to be a young man in mid-19th-century northern North America – at least for the majority who were of white skin, native birth, and English tongue. ⁸¹ But the temperance, labour-reform, and educational societies in which Gilman participated all had their female counterparts in Lowell. Furthermore, in contrast to his uncle, Gilman avoided the fraternal lodges which, according to Tosh, embodied "men’s privileged access to the public sphere, while simultaneously reinforcing women’s confinement to household and neighbourhood." ⁸² As an outspoken, independent minded worker, Gilman was presumably not in need of the psychic escape that the initiation ceremonies of such lodges are said to have offered from the restrictions and work discipline imposed by Victorian social conventions and structures. ⁸³ Indeed, the psychological profile presented by the historians of male gender identity is rather problematic as far as Gilman is concerned.

      Kimmel argues that during the antebellum era "[t]he Self-Made Man of American mythology was born anxious and insecure, uncoupled from the more stable anchors of landownership or workplace autonomy." ⁸⁴ In a similar fashion, Rotundo refers to youth in the 19th-century as the stressful and uncertain phase of life between boyhood, with its lack of restraints, and manhood, with its many responsibilities. The youths’ constant movement from place to place signified not only a search for employment and adventure, but also an uncertain sense of self. ⁸⁵ Both authors suggest that marriage was a means to escape this uncertainty through finding "a haven in a heartless world." ⁸⁶ Furthermore, until an unwed male reached his thirties, he continued to be considered a youth, without the respect and authority of married men of his age. ⁸⁷ Gilman’s repeated references to his lack of strong romantic attachments (though he was certainly attracted to young women), make it clear that he was very conscious of the social pressure to take a wife. At the age of thirty, in 1846, he remained in a semi-dependent, subordinate status as a boarder in the household of his uncle, who even neglected to pay him his wages.

      Gilman appears to have finally become engaged, or possibly even married, by  1849, ⁸⁸ but his living arrangements and resistance to romantic entanglement throughout much of the decade suggests that he was not particularly driven to "measure up" to what Rotundo and Kimmel perceive to be the prevailing notions of manhood. Though labourers generally married at a younger age than members of the middle class, the physical nature of their work presumably relieved them of anxiety about their manliness, as well as the need for the domestic refuge that bourgeois males sought from the rigors of the competitive workplace. To the not always grateful Gilman, his uncle’s home served as an adequate substitute, allowing him to cling longer than most workers to the freedom offered by his status as a "youth."

      Reflecting his independence, Gilman took a less censorious view of the theater than did the female operative who boasted in the Lowell Offering in 1841 that the town had remained free of such a demoralizing influence: "A number of years ago a theater was built, but public opinion indignantly opposed it. Its doors were very shortly closed; and recently it was pulled down to make way for shops of honorable (because useful) calling." ⁸⁹ Unfortunately, Gilman was too cautious in his letters to more than hint at adventures with the opposite sex, referring self-mockingly on one occasion to the "amours" of "the Deaconish D.S.G." ⁹⁰ Furthermore, while it was common for young men in the Victorian era to consort with prostitutes, and Gilman’s letters do contain sexual innuendoes, his rather prudish comments about the dress of certain young women he observed suggests that his behavior was somewhat restrained by the ideology of sexual self-control. ⁹¹

      Gilman clearly feared that emotional involvement would threaten his independence, for he wrote on 19 March 1848: "Sad affair truly for Moses to lose his woman thus cutting him down in his prime, but after all it is nothing to what it might have been for he might have lost his gizzard with her." Four years earlier (19 October 1844) he had written that "once a person becomes entangled in the meshes of love, they are in precisely the same situation with the bird when under the fascinating power of the snake – rushing headlong – Shall I say to their own destruction? No – for Matrimony does not destroy, but merely awakens one to a sense of past folly." Rather than misogyny, these passages reflect the romantic belief that marriage was not to be entered into lightly, for Gilman expressed shock at the prevalence of wife beating in Lowell. ⁹²

      Gilman’s choice of metaphors nevertheless suggests a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards women, which must have been common enough during an era when, according to Rotundo, young middle-class men established their closest emotional bonds with a small number of their peers of the same gender. These relationships involved physical – but rarely sexual – intimacy. ⁹³ Carroll Smith-Rosenberg found a similar dynamic with young middle-class women, as did Karen Hansen with unmarried working-class women, but Hansen also argues that working-class men did not establish mutual relationships of the same intensity. ⁹⁴ Whether or not this was true of Gilman is impossible to say with certainty. He clearly fraternized with his fellow workers, but no male names appear on a regular basis in his family correspondence.

      Furthermore, Gilman did socialize with young women at the evening lectures and in the labour movement. Although it was difficult and novel for cross-gender relationships to be exclusive, intimate, and yet non-romantic, unless between siblings, the only close Lowell friendship that can be identified in Gilman’s letters is that with his cousin, Welthia Gilman. ⁹⁵ Unfortunately for him, she returned to Brome after a relatively short period in Lowell. It is not surprising, therefore, that Gilman occasionally expressed a sense of loneliness in the relatively anonymous urban environment, or that he would hesitate to leave his uncle’s somewhat tumultuous household with its assorted in-laws and growing number of ill-disciplined children. Despite his gregarious nature, Gilman may not have experienced the intimate friendships which, according to Rotundo, offered a chance for rehearsal of marriage by allowing youths "to test their feelings about adult intimacy in a setting where lifelong commitment was not at stake." ⁹⁶

      Alternately, Gilman may have chosen to write only about individuals whom his family were acquainted with, but, if he did have close long-term friendships in Lowell, they did not entirely replace his need to confide in his brothers Roswell and Moses in Brome. His closest bond was with Roswell, who was six years his junior, and to whom most of his letters were written until Roswell began "courting" in the fall of 1844. The fact that Spencer’s contact with Roswell was effectively cut off after the latter married was typical of the male homosocial relationships described by Rotundo. ⁹⁷ In fact, Spencer could not help but express a hint of jealousy and betrayal after the wedding, writing to his next oldest brother, Moses, that "I suppose Roswell cannot be touched now with a ten foot pole but the novelty of the thing will wear off after awhile." ⁹⁸ When a baby was born a few months later, Spencer wrote rather dismissively, "As for Roswell’s boy I hardly know what to say, but suppose it happened kind of natural. Same as toadstools on a log." ⁹⁹

      Gilman’s taste for independence and adventure may appear to foreshadow the male middle-class revolt against domesticity and the feminizing constraints of civilized society in the later 19th century, ¹⁰⁰ but he embraced travel out of a sense of intellectual curiosity rather than masculine bravado. Even if he avoided marriage, Gilman shared in what women’s historians have labeled the cult of domesticity, expressing particular admiration for aunts who demonstrated good homemaking abilities. But, at the same time, he was not entirely a traditionalist in his attitudes towards women, nor a die-hard supporter of separate gender spheres. In contrast to the labour press, Gilman did not question the right of women to work for wages; indeed, he expressed admiration for Sarah Bagley, the radical president of Lowell’s Female Labour Reform Association who directly challenged the prescribed boundaries of the female sphere. ¹⁰¹

      Gilman neither partook in what Anna Clark calls the "bachelor journeyman culture of drinking rituals and combinations" nor "the aggressive celebration of physical strength" that John Tosh suggests was "an exclusive badge of masculinity" for the working-class male. ¹⁰² Indeed, Gilman discussed his recurring illnesses at some length and carefully avoided jobs that he considered too strenuous or taxing. Like his brother Moses, who asked him to scout for a clerk’s or tailor’s job in Lowell (10 April 1848), Spencer Gilman left the farm to avoid hard labour, not to embrace it.

      In short, Spencer Gilman appears to have been less dogmatic and rigid about gender roles and more secure in his male identity than he should have been by Tosh’s definition, which claims that masculinity has long rested on the three foundations of work, home, and male association. ¹⁰³ To Gilman, in his extended period of "youth," work was essentially a means of earning a necessary income, home was dominated by someone else, and associational life was not exclusively gender-based. Much of this would have changed with marriage, but it is difficult to believe that Gilman’s basic value system would have undergone a fundamental alteration in his thirties. Nor was he necessarily atypical in these attitudes for at mid-century "manliness" had not yet developed into the more exaggerated sense of gender identity known as "masculinity."

      Given the ready availability of correspondence by Lowell’s female workers during the 1840s, we must ask how their outlook compares with that of Spencer Gilman, and what this suggests about the construction of gender identity at mid-century. There are many obvious similarities, including a strong interest in events and people at home, and a sense of loneliness in the new urban environment, though this varied considerably from person to person. One can, nevertheless, detect a more urgent interest in domestic details in the letters written by the Lowell women than in those of Gilman. ¹⁰⁴ While certainly not disinclined to gossip about mutual acquaintances, Gilman also filled his letters with information about the economy, politics, scientific discoveries, and cultural life in general. Not confined by the regimentation of the factory or the curfew of the company boarding house, but, rather, changing occupations and touring nearby cities as the spirit moved him, Gilman had a broader view of the world than that expressed in the letters and diaries of the much more constrained female operatives. ¹⁰⁵

      While the horizons of the young female operatives whose letters survive may have remained necessarily limited (though the expectations of their audiences should be kept in mind), the fact remains that they were among the first American-born women to leave the confines of the domestic household, even if temporarily. They were therefore among the first to gain considerable independence from their fathers, as well as to develop a sense of sisterly solidarity against their male bosses. Furthermore, Gilman’s veiled references to female friends remind us that there were enough male workers in Lowell to ensure that the young women’s social activities were not entirely homosocial. ¹⁰⁶

      As does Spencer Gilman, these women unfortunately fade from the picture once their years as Lowell workers have ended, but their options would clearly have been more circumscribed than those of their male counterparts. Dublin has discovered that few of the female operatives returned home to marry farm boys, ¹⁰⁷ but their opportunities for occupational mobility were very limited, and one can only wonder if the strengthening cult of domesticity allowed their role as wives to change significantly from that of their mothers. Life in Lowell had nevertheless broken a pattern by permanently removing most of these young women from their tight-knit rural communities, just as it presumably did for many young male workers such as Spencer Gilman and his two brothers. Moses would join Spencer briefly in Lowell in 1849 before following him to the gold fields and an early death in California, while Roswell finally moved to Worcester, Massachusetts in 1864. ¹⁰⁸

Just as the small number of working women who edited the Lowell Offering and led the ten-hours’ movement can hardly be seen as "typical" of their gender, so Spencer Gilman’s intellectual alertness and strongly independent outlook may have set him apart from most young working men in Lowell, though he was not a locally prominent figure. The degree to which Gilman’s mentalité typified that of the young working-class men of mid-19th-century America will not be known until we begin to understand more about the private spheres of their lives. Certainly, there is a marked contrast in behaviour between Gilman and the brawling and boastful William Otter, the Maryland plasterer and innkeeper who published his autobiography in 1835. The two men may have shared a sense of adventure and independence, an antipathy to the Irish, a lack of sympathy for Black slaves, an indifference to religion, a commitment to Jacksonian political values, and even a love of pranks, but Gilman would only have been repulsed by the sadistic pleasure "Big Bill" took in beating other men senseless and torturing animals.

      Although Otter and his "jolly fellows" were far from being marginal figures in their community, Richard Stott suggests that Otter’s outrageous behavior, and his decision to publish his memoirs as a series of anecdotes, may have reflected a conscious reaction against the developing middle-class notions of morality and respectability. ¹⁰⁹ But these so-called middle-class notions were not new to the rural population who still constituted the great majority in North America. In any case, Gilman’s letters fly in the face of the Genoveses’ ill-considered charge that a cultural approach to the history of working men and women leads to the impression that they "miraculously create an ‘autonomous culture’ and resist successfully and totally the values and aspirations of the bourgeoisie." ¹¹⁰ Gilman’s class values were influenced not only by his experience as a wage worker, but also by his rural background and the middle-class influences which surrounded him. It is unlikely, therefore, that his decision to join the California gold rush can simply be construed as a cultural statement rejecting "Victorian ideology," as Stott has suggested for his counterparts. ¹¹¹

      While this paper has treated the concepts of class and gender separately, they were inextricably linked in what was clearly the basic defining characteristic of Gilman’s ideology or self-identity – his commitment to independence both as a wage earner and as a man. This commitment drew him away from the confines of his rural home to what was then a major industrial center; it attracted him to Jacksonian political culture; it led to frequent changes in livelihood; and it explains his interest in popular scientific culture, his hostility to at least the more sensational forms of religion, his involvement with the labour movement, his  resistance to marriage, and, finally, his trip to the California gold fields.

      One might construe such restlessness as a reflection of psychological insecurity, a sense of anxiety about social status and masculinity, but Gilman emerges from his correspondence as a remarkably self-confident young man, persisting in the gold fields, for example, after his partners quit in discouragement. Perhaps the reason he was not more "anxious" than the stereotypical male of the Victorian era was that he did not engage in "feminizing" white-collar work, or submit for long to one boss, but Tosh, Rotundo, and Kimmel may also have been too quick to generalize about such psychological characteristics, rather than heeding the warning against reification of gender identities made by many other gender historians. ¹¹²

      The wit, intelligence, and liberalism that emerge from Spencer Gilman’s letters were distinctive personal traits, ones not confined to a particular class, gender, or time period. In most respects, however, Gilman was an ordinary man caught up in the historical currents of his time, as he drifted, like so many others, from farm to city, from job to job, and from the eastern factory towns to the western frontier. There was nothing about his life to prevent him from remaining another unknown worker had his personal letters not fortuitously been preserved by his family and their descendants. This correspondence provides further evidence that New England workers, in Zonderman’s words, "were not an inarticulate mass, understandable only through analysis in the aggregate, but thoughtful individuals with their own insights into the early industrial system and the transformation of their working lives."