Daring Victoria Claflin Woodhull Was a Con Artist, Feminist, Broker, and Presidential Candidate Too Hot to Handle

 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull at the height of her fame.

Note—In the 152 years since Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman nominated for president only two women—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris—earned the nomination of a major political party and despite their fame, long political resumes, and declared status as a prohibitive favorites but lost—albeit by Electoral College smoke and mirrors—to a grafter, grifter and transparent idiot. 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull, born in Ohio on September 23, 1838, was nominated for President of the United States on April 10, 1872 almost 50 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in all of the U.S. .  Woodhull stood apart from other leaders of the Suffrage movement by her audacity, frank embrace of the most radical social causes, her shocking open challenge to Victorian sexual mores, and her mesmerizing effect on the public and press.

As early as 1870 Woodhull used the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Herald to announce her candidacy for President in the 1872 election.  It was a bold move.  Not only were women barred from the vote, but she would not even reach the Constitutionally mandated age of 35 until months after the March 1873 inauguration of the next President.  She maintained that while the law forbad women from voting, there was not a statutory ban on women running for or being elected to office.  In the hubbub created by her announcement over the unprecedented distaff candidacy, her age never became an issue.

She used the pages of her own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly which was founded the same year, and the lecture platform to keep her name and promised candidacy before the public.  Able to command press attention, which then as now liked a sexy and sensational show, she attracted the support of not only the most daring womanists and suffrage supporters, but of radical trade unionists, early socialists, prison and death sentence reformers, some former abolitionists, and Free Thinkers.  She took on a broad range of social issues and took a consistently radical and progressive stance.

On May 10, 1872, a meeting was held at Apollo Hall in New York City where the new Equal Rights Party was formed and announced its intentions to nominate Woodhull.  The meeting consisted almost entirely of Woodhull’s friends and inner circle of supporters.   A formal convention was called and held on June 8 with broader participation.  A platform was announced drafted by Woodhull, and her personal friend, the great Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass was nominated for vice president.  Douglas, however, was not present at the Convention and never acknowledged or accepted the nomination although he never officially renounced it.  In fact. that fall he would be elected as a Republican New York Presidential Elector. 

                                            Woodhall printed a campaign poster on her own press.

The issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly dated the same day as the Convention announced the ticket and platform:

The Equal Rights Party has selected Victoria C. Woodhull for the office of President, because it deems that the demand for the personal, social, legal, and political liberties of woman have been better advocated by her actions and in her speeches and writings than by any other woman. Religious liberty is not mentioned above, because it is held that, in the case of woman, it has not been specially infringed.  It is claimed as a right pertaining to all the people; one which the Equal Rights Party hold itself pledged to maintain against any national or State interference with (or infringement of) in any way whatever.

The Equal Rights Party has selected Frederick Douglass for the office of Vice President, because though born a slave, he has himself achieved both his education and his liberty; because he has waged a life-long, manful battle for the rights of his race, in which those of mankind were included; because he has proved that he knows how to assert the liberties of the people, and consequently it is assumed that he knows how to maintain them.

This announcement and its tone of radical defiance were picked up by the press across the country.  And all hell soon broke loose.  The candidate was in for a very bumpy ride.

Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23 1838, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well con artist and patent medicine peddler who may have passed on some of his persuasive flair to his beautiful older daughter.

At the age of 15 she married a 28-year-old doctor—and perhaps a quack—Canning Woodhull.  The couple had two children including a boy with an “intellectual disability.” Victoria soon discovered that her husband was an alcoholic, a chronic womanizer, and was abusive.  Unable, or unwilling, to support the family, he relied on his wife to provide income.    In San Francisco she worked as a cigar girl in rough and tumble saloons, and likely at least occasionally as a prostitute.

Later in New York she began her long collaboration with her younger sister Tennessee Claflin presenting themselves as clairvoyants and spiritual healers.  When her husband essentially abandoned the family, the sisters successfully took their act to Cincinnati and Chicago and began touring as spiritualist lecturers.  After 11 years Victoria obtained a divorce from her husband. 

Husband Number 2, Col. James Blood.

Her experience would inform her public rejection of conventional marriage as a form of chattel slavery for women.  She became attracted to the Free Love movement that percolated on the very most advanced frontiers of Free Thinking.  Around 1866 she either married or took up a common law relationship with Col. James Blood, a kind and cultured gentleman who subscribed to Free Love.

They settled back in New York with sister Tennessee and her extended family.  Living in relative comfort and respectability, the sisters established a popular salon where advanced thinkers and practical politicians rubbed shoulders.  Among her admirers was Benjamin Butler, the Radical Republican politician and former Civil War general who espoused both suffrage for women and free love.

Virginia proved a brilliant and daring conversationalist and advocated by turns and in combinations anarchism, socialism, Spiritualism, and racial equality. 

                            

                                              Victoria's younger sister and partner, Tennessee Claflin.

Sister Tennessee caught the fancy of 76-year-old Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who took her for a lover, consulted with her for spiritual advice and returned the favor by offering inside stock tips.  Armed with such information, the sisters invested and reaped fabulous profits.  Vanderbilt helped set them up in the first woman-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street, Woodhull, Claflin & Company.  The press hailed them as Queens of Finance. Susan B. Anthony regarded the venture as “a new phase of the woman’s rights question.”  Victoria, with typical blunt frankness noted that, “Woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”

A popular men's sporting and gossip newspaper--a competitor of the Police Gazzette--found the Woodhull and Claflin Brokerage house a topic of amusement.

In 1870 the sisters took advantage of their fame by launching their own weekly newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.  Victoria was the principal editor and writer.  The paper took on and advanced all of the most progressive causes of its day.  But it also pioneered in muckraking and investigative journalism, exposing fraudulent stock schemes, insurance frauds, and shady Congressional land deals.  The newspaper, which was often sold under the counter and was sometimes banned from the mails, had a very respectable circulation of more than 20,000 copies weekly for most of its seven-year run. 

In January 1871 Woodhull personally petitioned Congress on behalf of women’s suffrage.  She argued that the recently enacted 13th and 14th Amendments extended to women the same rights as newly freed slaves. Her argument attracted wide attention and admiration.  Although a majority report rejected her assertions, Benjamin Butler filed a minority report in her favor.  Leaders of the Suffrage movement including Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton invited her to address a meeting of the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) the next day. 

Woodhull presented a women's suffrage petition to the House Judiciary Committee.  Benjamin Butler with the balding head and mustache is seen at the top of the table and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is seated directly behind Woodhull.

But the spotlight of the Presidential campaign was thrown soon thrown on Woodhull’s most unusual household, which included not only her present husband, but also her first who showed up penniless and addicted to morphine and was taken in out of charity; her sisters and their liaisons; and her parents including the father who still was running patent medicine scams.  When her mother tried to blackmail Vanderbilt posing as Tennessee, he naturally withdrew his support and advice and turned his significant power against the sisters, who were soon forced out of their mansion ending their Salon.

Woodhull simply replaced the money lost from her business with speaking fees. 

Taking on the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential and popular minister in America, and two of three of his powerful sisters, ultimately took down Woodhull even as it tarred his reputation.

The powerful Beecher family, evangelist Henry Ward Beecher and his sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine began a concerted campaign against Woodhull for her advocacy of Free Love.  A third sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leader in the NWSA, supported her.

Woodhull became aware that Henry Ward was carrying on an adulterous affair with the wife of an associate.  She attempted to use that knowledge to get the Reverend not only to back off his attacks, but to introduce her at a major public lecture at Steinway Hall.  Despite the thinly veiled blackmail attempt, Beecher backed out at the last moment, and Woodhull was introduced by Theodore Tilton, the cuckolded husband of Beecher’s lover.

The speech itself went well until Woodhull’s younger sister Utica, bitter over Victoria’s fame and notoriety stood up in a box and directly challenged her sister to publicly proclaim her support of free love.  “Yes, I am a free lover!” Woodhull defiantly retorted, “I have an unalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! And with the right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”  

Woodhull was depicted as Satan for her advocacy of Free Love.

The subsequent scandal rocked the country and split the suffrage movement.  None-the-less the NWSA stood by her and even nominated her for President with Fredrick Douglas for Vice President in January of 1872.

Woodhull ran against Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and the Democratic nominee, famed maverick editor and publisher Horace Greeley, a former liberal Republican and erstwhile ally.  Victoria attempted to concentrate her campaign on the highly progressive Woodhull Platform.  But her now considerable enemies beset her at every turn.

Susan B. Anthony broke with other NWSA leaders to support Grant in an attempt to distance the movement from the increasingly scandalous Woodhull.  After the family was evicted from their home, they could not even find a house to rent and for a while had to sleep on the floor of their newspaper offices.  Business deals fell through and speaking engagements were cancelled.  The paper had to suspend publication for four months.  When it returned it ran a full expose of the Beecher/Tilton affair and another on a prominent broker with a predilection for young girls.  While circulation soared, the sisters were sued for libel and prosecuted for pornography.

Woodhull spent Election Day in jail.  No votes were recorded for her, but it is assumed that some of the 4000 or so rejected ballots in the election were for her.

Her legal difficulties dragged on.  In 1874 both sisters were finally cleared of criminal charges.  But they had to pay fines and court costs amounting to an astonishing half a million dollars.  All of the sisters’ assets, including their brokerage accounts, printing press, personal papers, and even their clothing were seized to pay the fines.  By 1876 she was divorced from Col. Blood and her beloved newspaper was silenced.

She turned to the comforts of religion while continuing to eke out a living as a lecturer.  After Cornelius Vanderbilt died unhappy heirs attempted to subpoena the sisters for testimony that he was not of sound mind.  Somehow—and speculation runs heavily to the Vanderbilt estate—money was found to send the sisters to England with a comfortable stipend on which to live.  Victoria lectured there, but her message was subdued.

Both sisters married well and prospered. 

Tennessee married Francis Cook, chairman of Cook, Son & Co., drapers, and also Viscount of Monserrate in Sintra on the Portuguese Riviera. Within months of their marriage, Queen Victoria made Cook a Baronet created a Cook Baronetcy and Tennessee became Lady Cook.  In Portugal she was known as the Viscountess of Monserrate. The couple lived at Doughty House in Richmond Hill, Surrey, now part of Greater London and at Monserrate Palace.

Although she never abandoned her radical viewpoints, Claflin lived the remainder of her life out of the public eye. She died in England on January 18, 1923.

Victoria in her later years as Mrs. John Biddulph Martin as a respectable English lady and humanitarian.

Victoria met a wealthy and conservative banker, John Biddulph Martin, and married him in 1882 and settled into a life of respectability and sponsorship of various humanitarian causes.  On a trip back to the U.S. she joined the tiny Humanitarian Party and was nominated as their candidate for President in 1892.  It was a last hurrah in the United States.

Back in England Victoria divided her husband’s estates after his death and backed a scheme to rent small plots to impoverished women so that they could become self-sufficient, founded an experimental school, and sponsored an annual agricultural fair.  She was active in World War I relief work.  She died in her sleep on June 9, 1927 at the age of 88 at her estate in Bredon, Worcestershire.

 

Early U.S. Labor Movement Scorned The Colored National Labor Union

The founding convention of the Colored National Labor Union in Washington, D.C. in 1869 as depicted in Harper's Weekly.  Note the presence of women delegates.

Isaac Meyers did not want it this way.  Neither did William H. Sylvis.  Myers was a 34 year old Black marine caulker from Baltimore who had organized a union of Black caulkers in the Chesapeake shipyards and a cooperative association to market their services to ship builders and dry docks.  Sylvis was a white 40 year old Philadelphia iron molder who was the founder, visionary leading light, and President of the National Labor Union (NLU), American labor’s first stab at a national federation uniting existing trade unions.  In the wake of the recently concluded Civil War and the end of slavery, both men dreamed of a united working class undivided by race.  Alas, that was not to be.

Sylvis and other Philadelphia unionists had called a founding convention for the NLU in New York City 1866.  He was taken ill and unable to attend that meeting, but the organization was launched and over the next two years had some success in attracting local unions, municipal Central Labor bodies, and a handful of national or international trade unions.  When the NLU met in Baltimore for its convention in 1868 it was clear that Sylvis would be elected the organization’s president.

National Labor Union founder and visionary William Sylvis wanted to include Black unions but could not overcome the vigorous objections of delegates to the 1868 convention in Baltimore.

Sylvis had taken note of the work of Meyers and his Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and invited him to address the convention held in his hometown.  Meyer reported on the progress of his union and of the co-operative shipyard and railway, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company.  He also appealed for membership in the NLU on behalf of his union and a handful of other fledgling Back unions.  Sylvis, who also envisioned worker-owned cooperatives as a model to escape from exploitive wage slavery, endorsed the application.

Aside from Sylvis, Black unionists had some support.  Delegate A.C. Cameron told the assembly, “…interests of the labor cause demand that all workingmen be included within the ranks without regard to race or nationality…”

But it was not enough.  Many organizations in attendance had Whites only rules embedded in their constitutions and bi-laws.  Others simply feared competition from Blacks who they assumed would either undercut wages or replace their members.  The convention voted overwhelmingly not to extend membership to Black organizations, although those few local bodies that accepted Black membership would be allowed to continue to do so.

                            Baltimore marine caulker Isaak Myers was the founder of the Colored National Labor Union.

Meyers was saddened, but likely not surprised.  He was also determined to find a way for Black unionists to unite nationally.  Acting quickly, Meyers and associates called for a founding convention of a new organization.  On January 5, 1869 214 Black mechanics, engineers, artisans, tradesmen and trades-women, and their supporters from 21 states assembled in Washington, D.C.  Notably absent were common laborers.  The new organization would mirror the NLU philosophically and structurally as an organization of the skilled trades.

That structure was not the only thing the new organization had in common with its inspiration.  In its founding documents it called itself simply the National Labor Union—the identical name to Sylvis’s organization.  Perhaps this reflected a forlorn hope that once established and up and running it might yet be allowed to merge.  To avoid confusion newspapers covering the founding meeting called the organization the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU).  The name stuck and quickly the organization was using that name as well.

Many issues came before the founding body.  One was a resolution calling on the Federal Government to stop “importation of contract coolie labor” to prevent it from becoming a “system of slavery.”  This was a slightly different take on Chinese exclusion passed by the NLU opposing, “the importation of a servile race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”

The wide-spread use of Chinese workers in the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and in large-scale mining operations had made eliminating the Yellow peril the number one issue of White unionists in California and the west.  There was a general fear that if it continued successfully it would spread east.

The CNLU, however, couched their resolution in far less racist terms than did the NLU and did not oppose free Chinese workers, unbound by servile contracts, and promised to include any who wished to join in CNLU unions.  In fact, the CNLU constitution opened the organization to Whites and any ethnicity as well as to women. 

Delegate John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and President of the National Equal Rights League laid out the expansive and inclusive vision of the new organization:

We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the altar of common interest the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman, whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.

Among the CNLU’s other resolves were for the extension and expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Forty Acres and a mule policy to provide of farmland for the rural Southern poor, government aid for education, and new nondiscriminatory legislation that would help black workers access the labor market.  Items like this show that the organization hoped to go beyond action over job issues to be the voice of Black labor as part of a broader movement for full emancipation and integration into society. 

Both the NLU and CNLU after initial success would find troubled waters ahead.  Sylvis died unexpectedly on July 27, just six months after the CNLU’s founding.  Without his visionary leadership the NLU slowly foundered.

Efforts at job action by CNLU member unions were met by the united opposition of not only employers but the press and government, which was quick to provide police power to break any strikes.  And all too often local White unions joined that opposition.  Unable to produce improved conditions on the job, membership began to dwindle, affiliate unions failed or disaffiliated when they could no longer afford to support a national body.

Fredrick Douglass, the most prominent Black leader in the United States, assumed the Presidency of the faltering CNLU but had no interest in administering a labor union federation.  The organization became an adjunct to his newspaper and a broader Black movement before fading away.

In 1872 Meyers was replaced as President by the veteran abolitionist and leading voice of Black aspirations, Frederick Douglass whose newspaper, the New National Era became the official organ of the union.  Douglas was an immensely talented and energetic man, but he had no experience as a trade unionist or much interest in the day-to-day administration of a labor federation.  The use of his paper helped boost its circulation.  The CNLU became just another platform for a broader Black agenda.  Within a couple of years it all but disappeared as a functioning union.

Both the NLU and CNLU were supplanted by the rising Knights of Labor, which aimed to organized skilled and unskilled labor together and which claimed, at least, to welcome members “without regard to race or color.”  Many of the NLU’s local unions and some of the surviving CNLU chapters switched affiliation to the Knights.  In practice local Knights assemblies often followed local custom in regard to Black membership.  But some strikes, including the St. Louis General Strike of 1877, a part of the broader Great Railway Strike, were notable for cooperation between Black and White unionists. 

As for Meyers, he worked as a detective at the Baltimore Post Office between 1872 and 1879 then operated a small Baltimore coal yard.  In 1883 he was rewarded for loyal service to the Republican Party with a political appointment as a Customs revenue officer for five years.   His public life continued as he organized and became President of the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men’s Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  He died Baltimore in 1891.

 

The Colored National Labor Union was the Unwanted Stepchild of the Labor Movement

The founding convention of the Colored National Labor Union in Washington, D.C. in 1869 as depicted in Harper's Weekly.  Note the presence of women delegates.

Isaac Meyers did not want it this way.  Neither did William H. Sylvis.  Myers was a 34 year old Black marine caulker from Baltimore who had organized a union of Black caulkers in the Chesapeake shipyards and a cooperative association to market their services to ship builders and dry docks.  Sylvis was a white 40 year old Philadelphia iron molder who was the founder, visionary leading light, and President of the National Labor Union (NLU), American labor’s first stab at a national federation uniting existing trade unions.  In the wake of the recently concluded Civil War and the end of slavery, both men dreamed of a united working class undivided by race.  Alas, that was not to be.

Sylvis and other Philadelphia unionists had called a founding convention for the NLU in New York City 1866.  He was taken ill and unable to attend that meeting, but the organization was launched and over the next two years had some success in attracting local unions, municipal Central Labor bodies, and a handful of national or international trade unions.  When the NLU met in Baltimore for its convention in 1868 it was clear that Sylvis would be elected the organization’s president.

National Labor Union founder and visionary William Sylvis wanted to include Black unions but could not overcome the vigorous objections of delegates to the 1868 convention in Baltimore.

Sylvis had taken note of the work of Meyers and his Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and invited him to address the convention held in his hometown.  Meyer reported on the progress of his union and of the co-operative shipyard and railway, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company.  He also appealed for membership in the NLU on behalf of his union and a handful of other fledgling Back unions.  Sylvis, who also envisioned worker-owned cooperatives as a model to escape from exploitive wage slavery, endorsed the application.

Aside from Sylvis, Black unionists had some support.  Delegate A.C. Cameron told the assembly, “…interests of the labor cause demand that all workingmen be included within the ranks without regard to race or nationality…”

But it was not enough.  Many organizations in attendance had Whites only rules embedded in their constitutions and bi-laws.  Others simply feared competition from Blacks who they assumed would either undercut wages or replace their members.  The convention voted overwhelmingly not to extend membership to Black organizations, although those few local bodies that accepted Black membership would be allowed to continue to do so.

                                  Baltimore marine caulker Isaak Myers was the founder of the Colored National Labor Union.

Meyers was saddened, but likely not surprised.  He was also determined to find a way for Black unionists to unite nationally.  Acting quickly, Meyers and associates called for a founding convention of a new organization.  On January 5, 1869 214 Black mechanics, engineers, artisans, tradesmen and trades-women, and their supporters from 21 states assembled in Washington, D.C.  Notably absent were common laborers.  The new organization would mirror the NLU philosophically and structurally as an organization of the skilled trades.

That structure was not the only thing the new organization had in common with its inspiration.  In its founding documents it called itself simply the National Labor Union—the identical name to Sylvis’s organization.  Perhaps this reflected a forlorn hope that once established and up and running it might yet be allowed to merge.  To avoid confusion newspapers covering the founding meeting called the organization the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU).  The name stuck and quickly the organization was using that name as well.

Many issues came before the founding body.  One was a resolution calling on the Federal Government to stop “importation of contract coolie labor” to prevent it from becoming a “system of slavery.”  This was a slightly different take on Chinese exclusion passed by the NLU opposing, “the importation of a servile race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”

The wide-spread use of Chinese workers in the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and in large-scale mining operations had made eliminating the Yellow peril the number one issue of White unionists in California and the west.  There was a general fear that if it continued successfully it would spread east.

The CNLU, however, couched their resolution in far less racist terms than did the NLU and did not oppose free Chinese workers, unbound by servile contracts, and promised to include any who wished to join in CNLU unions.  In fact, the CNLU constitution opened the organization to Whites and any ethnicity as well as to women. 

Delegate John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and President of the National Equal Rights League laid out the expansive and inclusive vision of the new organization:

We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the altar of common interest the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman, whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.

Among the CNLU’s other resolves were for the extension and expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Forty Acres and a mule policy to provide of farmland for the rural Southern poor, government aid for education, and new nondiscriminatory legislation that would help black workers access the labor market.  Items like this show that the organization hoped to go beyond action over job issues to be the voice of Black labor as part of a broader movement for full emancipation and integration into society. 

Both the NLU and CNLU after initial success would find troubled waters ahead.  Sylvis died unexpectedly on July 27, just six months after the CNLU’s founding.  Without his visionary leadership the NLU slowly foundered.

Efforts at job action by CNLU member unions were met by the united opposition of not only employers but the press and government, which was quick to provide police power to break any strikes.  And all too often local White unions joined that opposition.  Unable to produce improved conditions on the job, membership began to dwindle, affiliate unions failed or disaffiliated when they could no longer afford to support a national body.

Fredrick Douglass, the most prominent Black leader in the United States, assumed the Presidency of the faltering CNLU but had no interest in administering a labor union federation.  The organization became an adjunct to his newspaper and a broader Black movement before fading away.

In 1872 Meyers was replaced as President by the veteran abolitionist and leading voice of Black aspirations, Frederick Douglass whose newspaper, the New National Era became the official organ of the union.  Douglas was an immensely talented and energetic man, but he had no experience as a trade unionist or much interest in the day-to-day administration of a labor federation.  The use of his paper helped boost its circulation.  The CNLU became just another platform for a broader Black agenda.  Within a couple of years it all but disappeared as a functioning union.

Both the NLU and CNLU were supplanted by the rising Knights of Labor, which aimed to organized skilled and unskilled labor together and which claimed, at least, to welcome members “without regard to race or color.”  Many of the NLU’s local unions and some of the surviving CNLU chapters switched affiliation to the Knights.  In practice local Knights assemblies often followed local custom in regard to Black membership.  But some strikes, including the St. Louis General Strike of 1877, a part of the broader Great Railway Strike, were notable for cooperation between Black and White unionists. 

As for Meyers, he worked as a detective at the Baltimore Post Office between 1872 and 1879 then operated a small Baltimore coal yard.  In 1883 he was rewarded for loyal service to the Republican Party with a political appointment as a Customs revenue officer for five years.   His public life continued as he organized and became President of the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men’s Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  He died Baltimore in 1891.

 

The Colored National Labor Union was the Step Child of the Labor Movement——Focus on Black History 2021

The founding convention of the Colored National Labor Union in Washington, D.C. in 1869 as depicted in Harper's Weekly.  Note the presence of women delegates.

Isaac Meyers did not want it this way.  Neither did William H. Sylvis.  Myers was a 34 year old Black marine caulker from Baltimore who had organized a union of Black caulkers in the Chesapeake ship yards and a cooperative association to market their services to ship builders and dry docks.  Sylvis was a White 40 year old Philadelphia iron molder who was the founder, visionary leading light, and President of the National Labor Union (NLU), American labor’s first stab at a national federation uniting existing trade unions.  In the wake of the recently concluded Civil War and the end of slavery, both men dreamed of a united working class undivided by race.  Alas, that was not to be.

Sylvis and other Philadelphia unionists had called a founding convention for the NLU in New York City 1866.  He was taken ill and unable to attend that meeting, but the organization was launched and over the next two years had some success in attracting local unions, municipal Central Labor bodies, and a handful of national or international trade unions.  When he NLU met in Baltimore for its convention in 1868 it was clear that Sylvis would be elected the organization’s president.

National Labor Union founder and visionary William Sylvis wanted to include Black unions but could not overcome the vigorous objections of delegates to the 1868 convention in Baltimore.

Sylvis had taken note of the work of Meyers and his Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and invited him to address the convention held in his home town.  Meyer reported on the progress of his union and of the co-operative shipyard and railway, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company.  He also appealed for membership in the NLU on behalf of his union and a handful of other fledgling Back unions.  Sylvis, who also envisioned worker-owned cooperatives as a model to escape from exploitive wage slavery, endorsed the application.

Aside from Sylvis, Black unionists had some support.  Delegate A.C. Cameron told the assembly, “…interests of the labor cause demand that all workingmen be included within the ranks without regard to race or nationality…”

But it was not enough.  Many organizations in attendance had Whites only rules embedded in their constitutions and bi-laws.  Others simply feared competition from Blacks who they assumed would either undercut wages or replace their members.  The convention voted overwhelmingly not to extend membership to Black organizations, although those few local bodies that accepted Black membership would be allowed to continue to do so.

                            Baltimore marine caulker Isaak Myers was the founder of the Colored National Labor Union.

Meyers was saddened, but likely not surprised.  He was also determined to find a way for Black unionists to unite nationally.  Acting quickly, Meyers and associates called for a founding convention of a new organization.  On January 5, 1869 214 Black mechanics, engineers, artisans, tradesmen and trades-women, and their supporters from 21 states assembled in Washington, D.C.  Notably absent were common laborers.  The new organization would mirror the NLU philosophically and structurally and be an organization of the skilled trades.

That structure was not the only thing the new organization had in common with its inspiration.  In its founding documents it called itself simply the National Labor Union—the identical name to Sylvis’s organization.  Perhaps this reflected a forlorn hope that once established and up and running it might yet be allowed to merge.  To avoid confusion newspapers covering the founding meeting called the organization the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU).  The name stuck and quickly the organization was using that name as well.

Many issues came before the founding body.  One was a resolution calling on the Federal Government to stop “importation of contract coolie labor” to prevent it from becoming a “system of slavery.”  This was a slightly different take on Chinese exclusion passed by the NLU opposing, “the importation of a servile race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”

The wide-spread use of Chinese workers in the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and in large-scale mining operations had made eliminating the Yellow peril the number one issue of White unionists in California and the west.  There was a general fear that if it continued successfully it would spread east.

The CNLU, however, couched their resolution in far less racist terms than did the NLU and did not oppose free Chinese workers, unbound by servile contracts, and promised to include any who wished to join in CNLU unions.  In fact the CNLU constitution opened the organization to Whites and any ethnicity as well as to women. 

Delegate John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and President of the National Equal Rights League laid out the expansive and inclusive vision of the new organization:

We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the altar of common interest the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman, whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.

Among the CNLU’s other resolves were for the extension and expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Forty Acres and a mule policy to provide of farmland for the rural Southern poor, government aid for education, and new nondiscriminatory legislation that would help black workers access the labor market.  Items like this show that the organization hoped to go beyond action over job issues to be the voice of Black labor as part of a broader movement for full emancipation and integration into society. 

Both the NLU and CNLU after initial success would find troubled waters ahead.  Sylvis died unexpectedly on July 27, just six months after the CNLU’s founding.  Without his visionary leadership the NLU slowly foundered.

Efforts at job action by CNLU member unions were met by the united opposition of not only employers but the press and government, which was quick to provide police power to break any strikes.  And all too often local White unions joined that opposition.  Unable to produce improved conditions on the job, membership began to dwindle, affiliate unions failed or disaffiliated when they could no longer afford to support a national body.

Fredrick Douglass, the most prominent Black leader in the United States, assumed the Presidency of the faltering CNLU but had no interest in administering a labor union federation.  The organization became an adjuct to his newspaper and a broader Black movement before fading away.

In 1872 Meyers was replaced as President by the veteran abolitionist and leading voice of Black aspirations, Frederick Douglass whose newspaper, the New National Era became the official organ of the union.  Douglas was an immensely talented and energetic man, but he had no experience as a trade unionist or much interest in the day-to-day administration of a labor federation.  The use of his paper helped boost its circulation.  The CNLU became just another platform for a broader Black agenda.  Within a couple of years it all but disappeared as a functioning union.

Both the NLU and CNLU were supplanted by the rising Knights of Labor, which aimed to organized skilled and unskilled labor together and which claimed, at least, to welcome members “without regard to race or color.”  Many of the NLU’s local unions and some of the surviving CNLU chapters switched affiliation to the Knights.  In practice local Knights assemblies often followed local custom in regard to Black membership.  But some strikes, including the St. Louis General Strike of 1877, a part of the broader Great Railway Strike, were notable for cooperation between Black and White unionists. 

As for Meyers, he worked as a detective at the Baltimore Post Office between 1872 and 1879 then operated a small Baltimore coal yard.  In 1883 he was rewarded for loyal service to the Republican Party with a political appointment as a Customs revenue officer for five years.   His public life continued as he organized and became President of the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men’s Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  He died Baltimore in 1891.