I had many business vexations on returning to Chicago.  But also the campaign of 1848 was on, and I was deeply interested in it.  I had passed through the panic of 1837, but I was not then conscious that a labor movement was on.  That panic had stayed it, for a mason or a carpenter was glad of work in those hard days.  Then prosperity had revived and now it was in full tide due to a world condition; but in America also due to expansion and railroad building.  Mr. Van Buren, in 1840, then being President, and seeking, as his enemies said, to influence the labor vote, had issued an executive order to the effect that laborers and mechanics need work but ten hours a day.  Soon after this the bricklayers of Pittsburgh formed a union, the journeyman tailors of Washington opened a shop of their own; the workingmen of Philadelphia got into politics with an Equal Rights party.  The laborers everywhere were advocating organization and cooperation and strikes as a means to good wages.  In New York the laborers’ union association had demanded a dollar a day, made out a political program, which involved opposition to any candidate who did not support the interests of workingmen.  Sometimes the militia had to be called out, as in 1846 when some Irish workers on a strike were supplanted by Germans.  Horace Greeley had naturally taken a hand in this movement.  It attracted the humanitarian mind.  The revolutionary processes in Europe of this year, the success of the socialists in France, had a marked influence upon the conditions in America.  Meetings were held to congratulate the Chartists in England, the followers of Louis Blanc in France.  Strikes were on in Boston and Philadelphia.  I was caught in this world drift.  I had a strike on my building in Chicago.

I had left my affairs in the hands of an agent manager, who did not assume authority to meet the terms of the strikers.  Upon my return I was obliged to settle it myself.  I did this by promptly acceding to the demands made upon me.  What was a quarter of a dollar more a day to me?  I wanted my building to be finished.

One could not escape observing all this rebellion abroad and in America, this awakening of the worker, this fight for human rights upon slavery in the South, even if he did not have it brought to his mind in the concrete way that I did.  Slavery might be wrong, that was one thing; it might cut into the rights, first or last, of the free worker; but if the negro was owned in body and in energy, and his labor taken for nothing, except the food, shelter, and clothing required to keep him efficient, was that anything but just a matter of degree from the case of the white man who was paid so much a day, enough to give him food, shelter, and clothing, and thus keep him a fit machine?  Thus there was a moral sympathy between the white workers and the black workers; all were making money for an upper man.  If it was wrong to appropriate all the black man’s labor, it was wrong to appropriate too much of the white man’s labor.  The Declaration of Independence was a hard nut to crack.  While only a few hare-brained agitators wanted negro equality, even Douglas did not like slavery.