Uriah Smith Stephens

• Uriah Stephens
• Born: August 31, 1821
• Died: February 13, 1882

Labor leader and founder of the Knights of Labor, was a central figure in labor reform circles of the mid-nineteenth century. Little is known of Stephens’s family or personal life. Born near Cape May, New Jersey, he came from a family claiming patriotic origins. His paternal grandfather fought in the American Revolution and reportedly died in battle; his maternal relatives were descendants of Pennsylvania’s original Quaker settlers.

Stephens’s father intended his son to enter the Baptist ministry, but the economic panic of 1836 forced the family to make other plans, so the youth was indentured to a tailor. Eventually, he became an apprentice tailor and made the trade his calling. While an apprentice, he began a process of self-education that he pursed throughout his life. He began to study the economic, political, and social questions of the day and became interested in industrial issues particularly as they affected workers and the producing classes.

In 1845, at the age of twenty-three, Stephens left home in search of work. As a journeyman tailor he found a ready market for his craft in the manufacturing center of Philadelphia, where he joined the ranks of its artisan population, a group increasingly affected by the spread of mechanized production and factory labor.

Stephens worked for ten years as a tailor and garment cutter in Philadelphia. In that time he seems not to have been overly involved in public life. However, an extended trip beginning in 1853 deeply affected his outlook and moved him to begin his public career. His travels took him to the West Indies, Central America, Mexico, and California. Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1858, Stephens became a vocal proponent of westward migration for workingmen. His five-year stint in the West had convinced hi m of the opportunity for independence open to those who would take the chance and migrate. He began to view the region as the solution to workingmen’s economic problems, which were becoming increasingly severe in Eastern cities.

Through speeches and newspaper articles, Stephens argued that the major impediment to liberty for labor was its inability to acquire the means of an independent life. Specifically, he pointed toward limited access to land and to the products of work as the source of labor’s plight. In the West, he thought, land and productivity could be combined with knowledge and education to produce a laboring class able to accept the responsibilities of citizenship. Further, he argued that only an independent producing class could restrain the few from monopolizing the fruits of toil. In Stephens’s attack on the monopolists and his vision of an independent producing class lay the roots of the philosophy he would later bring to the Knights of Labor.

After returning to Philadelphia, Stephens became active in the fast-growing Republican party. In Republican politics Stephens was able to combine an interest in abolition with his new belief in westward expansion. The doctrines of free soil and free labor, united in the platform of the Republican party, gave Stephens his first opportunity for political action. In 1856, while in California, he had actively campaigned for John C. Fremont for president, and in 1860 he became an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln.

Although he supported Lincoln’s candidacy, Stephens deeply believed that war would spell disaster for the working people of the country. In 1861, even after the Republican victory, Stephens joined with William H. Sylvis of the Iron-Moulders’ Union and other labor leaders in calling for a national workingmen’s war-protest convention. The meeting, held in July of that year, was not as well attended as Stephens had hoped; still, the delegates went on record in favor of compromise between the North and the South. Unlike those abolitionists who refused any compromise with the slave system, the delegates hoped to prevent further conflict and preserve the Union through a scheme that would limit the expansion of slavery. They seemed willing to let the institution die an inevitable albeit slow death.

Once war was a reality, however, Stephens, like many other trade unionists, abandoned his antiwar stand. After shots had actually been exchanged, it seemed clear to him that preservation of the Union would be the only way to insure free soil and free labor.

After the Civil War, Stephens continued his support for the freed slaves and their rights to land and to the vote. During Reconstruction, however, he broke with the Republican party, which he felt had been “captured by the monopolists and held in thrall by the robber class”; but he remained committed to the ideals of the Republican party’s early days and to a broad spectrum of reform issues. During the 1870s he began his long agitation and support for the eight-hour day. He combined labor agitation with political work by joining the greenback Labor party in 1878.

During the Civil War Stephens had extended. his contact with the Philadelphia labor movement and broadened his intellectual horizons include an international outlook. In 1862 he was one of a small group of garment cutters to from a trade association in Philadelphia. Under pressure by employers with threats of wage reductions, the cutters joined together for mutual protection. Through the association Stephens began to link his own trade to the larger trade union community in the city. At some point during this period Stephens again took up travel this time to Europe; there he reportedly met and talked extensively with trade unionists in the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International).

It is likely that the talks with the International crystallized many of Stephens’s emerging beliefs, and on his return to Philadelphia he began to articulate for the first time a commitment to organization and action for workers. In 1869 Stephens put his newly adopted ideas into action when he and six other garment cutters formed the first assembly of the Knights of Labor.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, founded in the relative obscurity of Stephens’s garment association, became within a dozen years the nation’s major labor movement. During the war years, most of the nation’s trade unions had suffered serious decline. In addition, during the period just after the war, many skilled workers began to experience severe attacks on their position in industry. Stephens’s own garment cutters’ association had all but disbanded His new organization was designed to be wholly secret in its affairs and thus avoid the confrontations and betrayals so often experienced by the Garment Cutters’ Association. The past experience of the cutters convinced Stephens that an open organization could not survive. He felt that only with a “veil of secrecy” could the new movement grow. With this commitment, stephens developed an elaborate set of symbols and rituals for the new organization. The principle of secrecy remained central to his conception of the Knights’ movement and reflected his view of the order as a community or fraternal organization as much as a strictly defined labor union.

The order expanded rapidly among coal miners, who were themselves a tight-knit community. By the early 1880s, however, other groups began to join the Knights as well. The broad reform ideal that called for a renewal of American republican values and an end to the wage system appealed to a wide spectrum of labor during the post-Civil War era of rapid industrialization. The Knights’ vision of a producers’ community that included skilled and unskilled workers—and blacks and women as well—clearly spoke to the growing discontent among America’s laboring classes.

Stephens headed the Knights’ first assembly and strongly articulated a philosophy for the group. The order was to unite all workingmen (and eventually women as well) into an organization overcoming the narrow confines of craft or shop. Stephens envisioned the development, under a central leadership, of a nationwide movement that would usher in the era of the socialistic “cooperative commonwealth” and an end to the abuses and inequities of the monopoly system of industrial production. By uniting all branches of “honorable” trade under one banner, Stephens hoped to build the nucleus of the producers’ community within the labor movement itself. Ultimately, Stephens’s aim was the establishment of a “great brotherhood of man” that would cover the globe.

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, Stephens believed that agitation, organization, and education were the keys to the spread of any movement. If the Knights could put their ideas before enough people, he felt, the movement would grow. Only by converting all producers to the Knights’ cause could the cooperative commonwealth become a reality. However, being schooled in a trade, Stephens clearly knew the importance of industrial struggles and directed a major part of the effort toward raising wages. Idealism in the Knights of Labor thus combined a practical defense of workers’ rights on the job with a vision of a more humane society.

Stephens’s blueprint for the structure of the Knights’ organization and ritual reflected his sense of mission. His initial Local Assembly No. 1 was strictly a trade organization. Only garment cutters could vote. However, the cutters allowed men from other trades to attend the assembly as “sojourners.” These visitors were expected to carry the ideas of the Knights back to their own trades and eventually form assemblies of their own members.

The local assembly was to be a training ground in which members would be schooled not only in trade matters but in cooperation and in an understanding of “the value of organization” as well. Each local assembly in Stephens’s plan would send representatives to a district assembly. This body would not only support local work but would itself form the kernel of the producers’ cooperative. In the district assembly, the products of toil might begin to be exchanged without the expensive and parasitic middlemen that plagued so many postwar industries and trades.

Within five years, the Knights had expanded to more than four times their original number, extending their assemblies beyond Pennsylvania and into neighboring states. By 1878 the organization was large enough to call its first general assembly, at which delegates from each district and local assembly met to discuss the national goals and direction of their movement. Stephens was elected General Master Workman, to head what had become the nation’s largest national labor movement.

He remained at the helm of the growing Knights until the fall of 1879, when he resigned because of ill health. His resignation ushered in a new phase of the Knights’ organization. Stephens had always maintained a deep commitment to the order’s ritual and secret status. By the early 1880s, however, as the Knights increased in numbers and spread across the country, particularly among Catholic workers, secrecy was no longer feasible. Stephens’s successor, Terence V. Powderly, took over the office of General Master Workman and immediately began a revision of Knights’ internal policies. Most accounts claim a great deal of hostility between Stephens and Powderly, particularly over the issue of secrecy, yet Stephens seems to have genially bequeathed his leadership to Powderly, offering to help in any way he could. Stephens wrote Powderly to wish him well, saying that he hoped “your labors may be crowned with sccess and commensurate with the importance and extent of the work to be done.”

Stephens’s health declined rapidly after he left office and two-and-a-half years later, at the age of sixty, he died of heart failure in his Philadelphia home. He was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery. Stephens was fondly remembered in the Knights of Labor press as having a “sympathetic nature and loving hands which were always stretched out to relieve the suffering of the needy.” He left a wife and children whose names are nowhere mentioned. He himself was widely eulogized not only as the founder of the Knights’ movement but also as its inspiration and model. His reform work and commitment to the labor movement moved one Knight of Labor to write, “The world is better for his having lived in it and will be better for the remembrance of his actions while on earth.”

Biographical sources are sketchy. A short biography of Stephens appeared shortly before his death in the August 15, 1881, edition of the Journal of United Labor. This information was amplified later in memorials published in the Journal on February 2 and April 15, 1882. Additional biographical information can be found in J. R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. 1 (1918). Short sketches of Stephens appear in the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 1 (1891) and in The Dictionary of American Biography (1935). For information on his career and on the philosophy of the Knights of Labor, see Commons and also G. E. McNeill, ed., The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (1887). See also P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (1947).