General Matthew Mark Trumbull

Respectable Radical

By Ray Boston
Transcribed from PDF File

Ray Boston, associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois - Urbana, was born in Manchester, England, and educated at New College, Oxford. Before coming to Illinois, he was employed by the Manchester Evening News, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Daily Mirror, Reuters News Agency, and The Times of London. He was also a specialist lecturer in journalism at the Central London Polytechnic and did postgraduate research in British social history at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

WHEN GENERAL MATTHEW MARK TRUMBULL DIED at his home in Chicago on May 10, 1894, the following obituary notice appeared in a leading London periodical:

The death is announced of Gen. M. M. Trumbull at Chicago on the 11th ult. aged 68. General Trumbull, who was a native of London, emigrated to America 47 years ago, served with distinction in the Civil War and held various offices in that country. His chief works are 'The Free Trade Struggle in England' and 'Articles & Discussions on the Labour Question.' He was connected with The Monist and The Open Court in Chicago and had long been a voluminous contributor to American periodicals on economic and philosophical subjects.¹

Thus was the biography of a former labor radical trimmed and groomed to fit him for inclusion in the sober pages of The Athenaeum. No mention here of his expressed youthful desire to "fight for the immediate overthrow of the British monarchy and the erection on its ruins of a British republic,"²² nor of his sensational writings in defense of the Haymarket anarchists.³ No mention, in fact, of anything to make the entry worthy of more than a passing glance by some tea-sipping octogenarian London clubman. This little-known Chicago lawyer and writer is, however, deserving of wider recognition than this.⁴

Trumbull was born on December 30, 1826, in the parish of St. Margaret in the city of Westminster, county of London. His mother and father were "very religious people" but "belonged to opposite and contradictory sects."⁵ Trumbull's father, Mark, owned a small general provisions store that did "a very fair business in a mercantile way, until he ventured a little farther than prudence warranted" and was arrested for debt and taken to the fearsome Marshalsea prison. Matthew was only three years old at the time.⁶

Situated on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark, South-East London, the Marshalsea was in existence as early as 1381, when it was attacked by Wat Tyler's insurgents from the Kent countryside. It was called "one of the very worst prisons in London" by Chartist leader John Frost, who in 1823 was also imprisoned there for debt.⁷

Evidently, Trumbull was not too closely confined in the prison, because he was always able to lead his wife and child to the "Snuggery" for refreshment when they visited him.⁸ Despite the loss of the family business, Mrs. Trumbull managed to borrow some money and paid off the debt, thus releasing her husband. Reunited, the family "began the world again with nothing but stout hearts and willing hands." Trumbull later recalled that "the consequence of all this was that the rest of my childhood and youth was spent in poverty, and a life that might have amounted to something was twisted out of all proportion to its original destiny."⁹

There would seem to be in this last remark ("a life that might have amounted to something") a hint that Matthew considered himself to have been born into the middle class. That this is quite likely is suggested by historian G. Kitson Clark:

In trying to form a mental picture of Victorian society it is probably necessary to allow the retail shopkeeper... a very much larger section of the canvas than he would possess now... [shopkeepers] would be more likely to be literate, though not well-educated, and reasonably sure of themselves in a population in which there would be a great many people who were still illiterate or relatively illiterate and very humble. The shopkeeper would also be more likely to have a Parliamentary vote.¹⁰

For Trumbull, as for Charles Dickens (whose father had been a successful clerk in the Navy Office until imprisoned for debt at the Marshalsea), the "descent from the possibility of some sort of middle-class education to manual labor... was a descent into the nethermost hell, the denial to him of everything that made life worth while, an injury never to be forgotten and never to be forgiven. Indeed... the more thin the partition between a middle-class family and the working class, the more passionately its importance might be estimated, which is of course natural and to be expected."¹¹

Trumbull spent his early youth in and around London during the prolonged trade depression of 1836-1843, when newspaper reports of inquests clearly suggest "that men and women did actually die of hunger" in many parts of England.¹² Trumbull, too, must have suffered hardship. He referred to his early education in these terms: "In my youth I received some benefit through the efforts of a benevolent society for the education of the poor," graduating from school at the age of thirteen "with a little reading, writing, and 'ciphering,' as we called it in those days."¹³

My parents being poor, it was natural that I should as early as possible help them to earn our living. At thirteen I was lucky enough to get a job of work [as a bricklayer's laborer] at a dollar and a quarter a week, and thirteen hours a day.... I need not say how hard, grinding, and premature the labor... was; the memory of it is too bitter; so let it pass.

At the time I speak of, the lines of caste were sharply drawn in England, and I was duly instructed to "Fear God, Honor the King, and be contented in that station of life which it had pleased God to give me."... When the facts of our lives are considered it will not be surprising that we ceased to honor the King or to fear God. We became Chartists.... ready to storm the Tower of London as the Frenchmen stormed the Bastille. I made imitation Jacobin speeches, bombastic as the real ones, and I wrote red poetry for the Northern Star, the fiery organ of the Chartist party.¹⁴

The Chartist movement, united around six points of constitutional reform - manhood suffrage, the ballot, payment of elected representatives, annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, and abolition of property qualifications for elected representatives - is usually considered to have been the first working-class movement in the world.¹⁵

During his years as a bricklayer's laborer, Trumbull claimed that he was "cooped up for most of his life within the walls of London." This must surely be an exaggeration, for he says later that he "travelled afoot over many of the country roads in England" in search of work.¹⁶ Like many other "tramping artisans" of the period, Trumbull suffered from the displacements of the Industrial Revolution and the trade depression of the 1840's.17 He was forced to make increasingly longer tramps:

Once when I was about 19 years old I went from London down into Lancashire. I had a job of work at a place called Prescott, a short distance out from Liverpool. [The year was 1845.] I had to make the trip on foot for I could not afford the luxury of riding. I walked 40 miles the first day and rested that night at a little town called Tring in Hertfordshire.... I was on the road before daylight next morning for I wanted to make another forty miles before night.¹⁸

By this time Trumbull had become, if not a fully qualified bricklayer then at least, "a deputy bricklayer."¹⁹ Like many other skilled working-class Chartists in London, he had become disillusioned with the leadership of the movement, particularly the faction led by the bombastic Irishman Feargus O'Connor, who advocated physical force to achieve labor's goals. Violent strikes and police repression came in 1842 as a result of the ascendancy of O'Connor and his "physical force" followers. In 1844 O'Connor broke with his lieutenant, Thomas Cooper, who had been imprisoned, Trumbull wrote, for two "purgatorial" years at Stamford Gaol for his part in the 1842 demonstrations. Trumbull greatly admired Cooper ("one of my political schoolmasters, and my religious confessor") and concluded that Chartism had declined into "mere O'Connorism." ²⁰ Trumbull decided, therefore, that it was time for him to seek a new and better environment - and what better place for a Chartist than America.

One Sunday evening I was at a coffeehouse in London where the Chartists used to meet and study the Northern Star. The paper for that week contained a copy of the new Constitution of Wisconsin, which territory was then making preparations for admission as a State into the American Union. Discussing it, one of the party said, "Here is a land where our Charter is already the law; where there is plenty of work and good wages for all; why not go there?" To me the question sounded logical; if the Charter was not to be obtained in England, why not go to America.... Shortly after that, I was on board an emigrant ship a-sailing Westward, Ho!²¹

Matthew Trumbull was nearly twenty-one years of age when he purchased a ticket to Canada in the fall of 1846: "It was the year of the great exodus from Ireland, when I bought a steerage ticket on board the pestilential Julius Caesar, a worm-eaten old tub bound from Liverpool to Quebec.... not fit to carry passengers at all.... Four hundred men, women, and children were crowded into the dark, damp, and noisome dungeon called the 'hold.'"22

The hellish journey took fifty-one days. Some sixty-two passengers died of typhus or starvation, and the chief satisfaction for those who survived the trip was seeing the "rascally" captain, mortally sick with typhus, swung ashore at Montreal in a basket. Trumbull himself survived by deserting the hold and finding "refuge with half a dozen others in the long boat which was swung 'amidships' in the open air."23

Given a job as soon as he landed ("never before had any man done me the honor to solicit my services"), Trumbull was provided with the tools of his profession - "a wheelbarrow, pickaxe, and shovel." He worked on the railroad at Longueuil, across the river from Montreal, "until the Canadian winter made the ground like stone, and I could dig no more."²⁴

Then came news that employers were "begging for workers" in America. "This demand was not confined to the lower forms of labor; it was eager for mechanics, clerks, teachers, and professional men.... Having saved a little money, I started on foot for Vermont, but on the road near Granby in Canada, I was waylaid by a farmer." Trumbull was hired first as a laborer and then as schoolteacher for the village.²⁵

He remained there until the summer of 1847, when he "resumed the march to Boston." During that time he made the acquaintance of a sixteen-year-old Canadian girl by the name of Christinna, whom he later married.²⁶ The year at Granby had awakened within Trumbull "a new· ambition" and "a higher aspiration." He notes in his autobiography: "I had been advised at Granby by a friendly patron to study law. At first I thought he was jesting, but... he assured me that the professions in America were not as in England, the exclusive property of the rich. The dream was a fascination."²⁷

But it had to be deferred even after he arrived in Boston, where the only work he could get was humping barrels of pork in a warehouse for $1.00 a day. He was not long in choosing to leave Boston in the company of the United States Artillery "bound for the conquest of Mexico."²⁸

Through military association I became well acquainted with many of the men who afterward became famous as generals fighting against each other in the civil war. Of course, I knew nothing at the time of the ethics or the politics of the war with Mexico; but afterwards, when I came to study the genius and the inspiration of it, I thought it nothing to be proud of.²⁹

Discharged from the army towards the close of 1847, he taught school and studied law in Virginia until, in 1852, "an imprudent habit of criticising slavery" necessitated his leaving Richmond. After the murder of a white family by a slave, Trumbull was one of several abolitionists who were sought out by angry citizens. He later described the chase as "something like a wolf-hunt. I was not curious to see the end of it.... The next morning I was in Washington. From there I started westward, and did not stop until I was landed safely on the free soil of the western prairies."³⁰

When Trumbull did arrive on the prairies in 1853, it was in Iowa that he settled. Just why he made this choice is not clear. He worked first in a brickyard near Des Moines. In time he moved his wife and two sons, aged six and one, to Dubuque, where he purchased a forty-acre farm for $50.³¹

Trumbull had never given up his dream of becoming a lawyer, and in the spring of 1854 he passed the bar, despite "an unusually severe examination,  caused by prejudice of the bar against the admission of a brick-yard labourer."³² In the fall of 1857 he was elected on the Republican ticket to the Seventh General Assembly of Iowa. There, as he said, he "played the part" of an American statesman "with perfect satisfaction." At that time "wages for a statesman was only three dollars a day." Trumbull considered the experience worthwhile, nevertheless, since it enlarged the circle of his acquaintance with prominent men. One of these acquaintances, who was to become a very useful friend, was Ulysses S. Grant, whom Trumbull first met socially in Dubuque.³³

The outbreak of the Civil War cut short Trumbull's promising legal career. He fought in the Missouri campaign of 1861 and later served in Tennessee, first as a captain of Company I, Third Iowa Infantry, and then after August, 1862, as lieutenant colonel of the unit. After being discharged for a disability arising from severe wounds sustained at the Battle of Shiloh, Trumbull reenlisted on November 30, 1863, and was appointed colonel of the Ninth Iowa Cavalry. He was brevetted brigadier general on March 13, 1865, and honorably discharged in February, 1866.³⁴

Speculating on Trumbull's motives for entering the military service, his socialist friend George Schilling wrote:

Some may have joined the army in those days simply to preserve the union of States - not so General Trumbull. He joined the army and participated in that great conflict for the purpose of freeing the negro.... he felt that the end of the war would simultaneously be the end of slavery. Sitting by his fireside in latter years, conversing with friends, repeating his reminiscences of the war, he frequently expressed the joy he felt in his old days because of the fact that no negro ever came to his camp and left it a slave....

One day, from headquarters, he spied an excitement in his camp. Hurrying to the scene, he learned that a slave-holder wished to reclaim his slave - a negro girl, dressed in men's clothes, engaged in the camp cooking for a mess of the Union soldiers. The General, discovering the cause of the trouble, ordered the slave-holder to leave the camp, refusing to surrender the colored girl. The next day the slaveholder returned with an order from General Sherman asking General Trumbull to surrender the slave. After reading the order he tore it into strips, exclaiming: "I don't care about the orders of General Sherman; get out of this camp - git, git, git." And he got.³⁵

In February of 1866, Trumbull returned to Iowa and was elected district attorney of the Ninth Judicial District of that state.³⁶ He served for about three years and then resigned to accept the appointment, offered "without any solicitation" by President Grant, of collector of internal revenue for the Third Congressional District of Iowa. In 1877 Trumbull resigned this office and began an extended visit to England, "which he had not seen for more than thirty years."³⁷

With evident satisfaction, he remarks in his autobiography:

I returned to England in a floating palace, but not in the steerage this time. I occasionally visited the steerage in an inquisitive way, where I heard the grumbling, and connived at it, but all the time I was thinking of the Julius Caesar.... The contrast between the steerage fare of the Devonia and that of the Julius Caesar measures the increase of material comforts made in the lifetime of one man. A similar advance has been made in other directions, but it is to be deplored that the poor man has not in all other cases received such a proportion of it as he gets on an emigrant ship.³⁸

Just what Trumbull did in England, or even the length of his stay, is not revealed in his autobiography. But one is led to believe that he might have kept his "Englishness" in the background when calling on the editors of The Athenaeum and Nineteenth Century. There is no mention in Nineteenth Century of his being anything other than an American general with rather eccentric views on American aristocracy - his article about which, according to his Chicago publishers, was "very much discussed in England and also in the United States."³⁹

It is commonly believed by many Americans that, because they have no titled nobility, nor any hereditary privileged orders, that therefore they have no aristocracy: this is a mistake. Aristocracy is not only legal in the United States but it has been deliberately established in the Constitution.... by which I mean "aristocracy" as the Americans use the word, namely to describe a class of pretenders who would be titled people if they could, and a class who assume superior importance on account of money.... the Toryism of the American Supreme Court would comfort the soul of Lord Eldon.⁴⁰

On his return from England, Trumbull sold his home in Iowa and, in 1882, moved to Chicago. There he devoted more time to writing than to his law practice and began his best-known book, The Free Trade Struggle in England, in which he attempted "to show that the moral of the Free Trade contest is as applicable to the United States today as it was to England forty years ago.... while presenting at the same time a fair and truthful history of the struggle for Free Trade in England."

The book, first published in 1884, was a great success and added to Trumbull's growing reputation as a liberal lawyer and man of letters. In the Preface to the second edition Trumbull remarks characteristically: "Had the English arguments for Protection been preserved in Mr. Edison's  phonograph, the unwinding of the machine would not have more faithfully reproduced them than they have been reproduced by the American protectionists in the debates in Congress - excepting this one, 'the foreigner pays the tax'. In all the debates in Parliament between 1841 and 1846, I cannot find it on record that any member was foolish enough to think that, or daring enough to say it." At the time of Trumbull's death, some ten years later, the New York Times observed that Trumbull's book was still "used in the nature of a textbook in some institutions.41

In 1886 Trumbull was clearly prompted to put his youthful ideals to the test by returning to politics. The Haymarket affair of that year immediately involved the politically liberal community of the city. Trumbull joined other former Chartists (notably George Julian Harney, then a resident of Boston; Thomas Phillips of the Philadelphia Knights of Labor; James Charlton, ticket manager of the Chicago & Alton Railroad; William J. Linton, the leading wood-engraver of his epoch; John Francis Bray, "the Grand Old Man of American Socialism"; Richard Hinton; and David Johnston) in arguing that the anarchists' trial had been unfair.⁴²

Trumbull himself declared repeatedly that he was "a strong opponent of the methods and principles of the people known as anarchists, and especially of their theory of reform by physical violence." In earlier debates with Samuel Fielden, Albert Parsons, and August Spies, three of those arrested, Trumbull had insisted that "no change for the better is possible except through moral forces."⁴³ He argued further that judges who misused the law were "more guilty than delinquents of inferior degree."⁴⁴ Seven of the eight anarchists had been convicted and sentenced to death on August 20, 1886 (the eighth, Oscar Neebe, was given a fifteen-year sentence). On appeal to the Illinois State Supreme Court in March of 1887, the sentence imposed by Judge Joseph E. Gary was upheld. In October the case went to the United States Supreme Court, but again the lower court was upheld. The date for the execution of the men was set for November I I, 1887. The only remaining hope for the anarchists was executive clemency from Governor Richard J. Oglesby.⁴⁵

Three days before the death sentence was to be exacted, Trumbull joined a special delegation to Springfield to speak with the Governor. This is how the visit was reported in the Chicago Tribune of November 10, 1887:

Gen. M. M. Trumbull followed Capt. [William Perkins] Black [counsel for the defense]. He had remained standing while Capt. Black was speaking, and his attitude was one of deep depression. When it was his tum to speak he came forward and said: "As an old soldier who has fought on the battlefield of the Republic with you I ask permission to say one word on the side of clemency. What I have to say about the fairness or unfairness of this trial I have said in a little pamphlet which your Excellency does me the honor to say you have already read. Yet I simply wish to add one appeal for mercy.... Your Excellency, you were Mr. Lincoln's friend.... [Let] mercy... [be] the crowning glory of your magistration, as it was that of Abraham Lincoln.... In behalf of the families of these men, in behalf of the men themselves, in behalf of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who sympathize with them in their misfortunes, I implore your Excellency to show mercy in this case.⁴⁶

On the evening of November 11, just hours before the scheduled execution, Oglesby announced his decision. The sentences of Fielden and Michael Schwab were commuted to life imprisonment; Parsons, Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were to be hanged that evening. (The seventh condemned man, Louis Lingg, had committed suicide in his jail cell the previous day.)

Almost immediately, relief was given for the families of the dead men, and organizations were formed for arranging appeals for Neebe, Fielden, and Schwab. Trumbull turned to, his writing "with the most radical temper he could summon up at his ripening age."⁴⁷ He was then sixty-one.

Following the trial he wrote several books and articles about the case - among them, "Judge Gary and the Anarchists," Was It a Fair Trial?, and The Trial of the Judgment.⁴⁸ Also at this time Trumbull became a frequent contributor to Open Court, a Chicago-based weekly magazine that specialized in political, sociological, and philosophical subjects. From January, 1887, until the week of his death in May, 1894, his articles appeared there regularly. When the magazine became a weekly in 1890, Trumbull was made assistant editor and given his own column, "Current Topics," which soon became known for its sharp Cassandra-like commentary. His years with Open Court were marked by controversy, and he bowed to neither public opinion nor the management of the magazine.⁴⁹

Through his activities on behalf of the Haymarket defendants, Trumbull became acquainted with the socialist labor leader Thomas J. Morgan, who was also a British émigré living in Chicago. After hearing Morgan at a rally, Trumbull wrote, "I thought myself once more a boy in London cheering the labor gospel at the Chartist hall in John Street. Mr. Morgan looked like a Chartist, spoke like a Chartist, and the spirit of Chartism was the magnetic string by which he tied the audience together."⁵⁰ Morgan's assessment of the Haymarket trial matched Trumbull's: "We believe that the trial, conviction and execution of these men was nothing else than lynch law and a disgrace to the American nation ... revealing one law for the poor and another for the rich."⁵¹

The two Englishmen joined with Henry Demarest Lloyd in founding the Amnesty Association for the purpose of gathering public support for pardon of the surviving anarchists. Many thousands joined the association in its crusade, but they were unsuccessful in pleas for executive clemency from Governor Richard J. Oglesby or his successor, Joseph W. Fifer. Not until after the election of John Peter Altgeld were they to be successful. On June 26, 1893, Altgeld issued his famous pardon message. Trumbull attended a celebration for the released prisoners and then collapsed at his home. He was ill throughout the following winter and died on May 10, 1894.

Trumbull resembled two men about whom he had written. Like London Chartist leader William Lovett, Trumbull was "by temperament a student and a teacher" who finally found his forte in radical journalism. Like General Sir Charles Napier, "the most discerning and most chivalrous of enemies," Trumbull regarded the" 'physical force men' as the worst enemies of his cause. "⁵²

Perhaps Trumbull was too much of an individualist to be a true reformer ("self reform is the true tonic of exhausted labor. The man who would elevate society must raise his own part of it, which is himself.... trust in 'government' will accomplish nothing").⁵³ A skilled worker before he left for America and "a member of an ancient and exclusive trade union, he had no first-hand knowledge of industrial England, with its... operatives, swept together, without traditions or organizations, in towns which were little better than mining camps."⁵⁴ Moreover, he was obviously more desirous of self-education than political change.

On the other hand, his autobiography provides evidence that he never lost his "common man" associations, never retreated into revivalism, and never became merely another interesting survival in an alien world. "Deprive us of our moral weapon, the ballot, and we shall then try to equalize conditions by the sword," he threatened in 1889.⁵⁵

Trumbull was younger than most of the Chartist refugees who fled to America in the 1840's, and unlike so many other Chartists he does not seem to have been urged to leave England by any agency more pressing than his own convictions. Furthermore, his service in the United States Army may have accelerated his Americanization to such a degree that he was spared the early frustration and impatience of many immigrants who had been motivated by the idea of "nothing to lose at home and everything to gain in America."

Trumbull was a successful solitary, a self-made man with sturdy convictions and a dream clear enough to be followed with the single-mindedness of the obsessionalist.

Paul Carus, editor of Open Court, delivered the eulogy at Trumbull's funeral. According to Carus, Trumbull was often "misunderstood and misrepresented.... [and] because he worked for the improvement of the laboring classes, he was branded as a demogogue and sower of discontent. How little this is true those know who have read his writings."⁵⁶

The most interesting view of Trumbull's public life can be gleaned from a letter drafted by Carus⁵⁷ some time after Trumbull's death in 1894. The letter was a request for a pension for Trumbull's widow:

I was intimately acquainted with Gen. Trumbull and his family. My attention was attracted to Gen. Trumbull through his writings in a radical religious and labor weekly, and then more particularly through his little book on the labor question "Wheelbarrow," and his efforts for the pardon of the anarchists. From the year 1887 until his death, he was a regular contributor to The Open Court, writing the "Current Topics" of that Journal and assisting otherwise in its publication....

Gen. Trumbull did a great deal to clear up the labor-problem, and to lessen the existing bitterness between labor and capital. Mr. Lyman G. Gage of Chicago [president of the First National Bank] was a great friend of his.

The main feature of his character was sincerity. He wrote strongly against the abuse of the pensions and... he was oversensitive in the matter of applying for a [disability] pension on his own behalf.

The Trumbulls lived in a very simple way; a large family having been brought up and generous help that was not paid for extended to many.⁵⁸ The General's conduct throughout life was controlled by disinterested sentiments on public matters....

Though always frugal and industrious, the making of and saving of money occupied too little of his attention, and for long periods the personal and unselfish work of his devoted wife and daughter have furnished the principal support of the family. Later, when his disease developed, their careful nursing sustained his capacity for literary work and both prolonged and made his life bearable for years.⁵⁹

His part in the war was unquestionably the main effort of his life, and now when the Union not only [is] restored but a national friendship becomes more firmly cemented together and all are satisfied with the abolishment of slavery, I think that Congress will be glad to show the nation's gratitude and honor him and his devoted wife by making her independent.

And what did his Chartist friends think about this former private in their struggling "army" who had emigrated and become "a prominent and successful Chicago lawyer"?⁶⁰ Chartist leader George Julian Harney, who had known Trumbull since 1886, said of him: "[He] was a man whose name was not known to fame when [he was] a participant in our old movement, but his subsequent career has been such that every old Chartist still living may feel proud of their once humble, unknown associate."61

1. The Athenaeum, June 2, 1894, p. 713.

2. Matthew Mark Trumbull, "Current Topics," Open Court, 6 (1892), 3316.

3. Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair: A Study in the American Social-Revolutionary
and Labour Movements (New York: Farrar, 1936), pp. 440-41.

4. Trumbull's thirty-one-page autobiography, written under the pseudonym "Wheelbarrow," has been virtually neglected until recently by -labor historians. It is titled Articles and Discussions on the Labor Question... (Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co., 18go). See also Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839-1900 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1971), pp. 28-31.

5. "Wheelbarrow," pp. 11-14·

6. Ibid., p. 15. Imprisonment for debt was not abolished in England until 1869.

7. David Williams, John Frost: A Study in Chartism (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969), p. 63. The prison was finally closed in 1849 and is well described in Charles Dickens's Little Dorritt.

8. "Wheelbarrow," p. 16.

9. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

10. G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England... (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Ig62), p. 122.

11. Ibid., p. 120. In later years he expressed an envy for students stronger than he had ever felt "in all my life toward any others of my brother men"; see "Wheelbarrow," pp.
156-57·

12. Clark, p. 83.

13. "Scarcity Making," Open Court, 2 (1888), 996; "Wheelbarrow," p. 18.

14. "Wheelbarrow," pp. 18-20.

15. See Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 12.

16. "Wheelbarrow," p. go.

17. E. J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York:
Basic Books, Inc., Ig64), pp. 34-36.

18. "Wheelbarrow," p. 139.

19. Ibid., p. 249.

20. Trumbull, "Thomas Cooper: In Memoriam," Open Court, 6 (1892), 3348-49; Boston, passim.

21. "Wheelbarrow," p. 20. For a discussion of the constitutions of the midwestern states at this time, see Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1960; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 309.

22. "Wheelbarrow," pp. 21-22.

23. Ibid., pp. 24-26.

24. Ibid., pp. 28-29.

25. Ibid., pp. 29- 30.

26. 1856 census records of Butler County, Iowa, Iowa State Department of History and Archives, Des Moines.

27. "Wheelbarrow," p. 31.

28. Ibid., p. 32.

29. Ibid., p. 33. See also Trumbull to Paul Carus, Feb. 5, 1893, Open Court Papers, Southern Illinois University Archives, Carbondale. The Open Court Papers are on deposit at the library and may not be reprinted or quoted without permission of the Edward C. Hegeler Foundation, Box 10, La Salle, Illinois 61301. See also Dubuque Herald, May 11, 1894.

30. "Wheelbarrow," p. 34.

31. Information provided by Joan Muyskens, former editor of Annals of Iowa. See also "Wheelbarrow," p. 274.

32. "Wheelbarrow," p. 35.

33. Ibid., pp. 36-37; Frances P. Trumbull to Carus, May 25, 1898, Open Court Papers. See also "Notable Deaths," Annals of Iowa, I (1894), 502.

34. Trumbull, The Trial of the Judgment: A Review of the Anarchist Case (Chicago: Health and Home Pub. Co., r888), p. 75; Congressional Record, 54 Cong., 2 Sess. (r897), pp. 955-56. See also S. D. Thompson, Recollections with the Third Iowa Regiment (Cincinnati: n.p., 1864).

35. George A. Schilling, "The Lion and the Lamb Blended," Open Court, 8 (1894), 4081.

36. On June 24, 1866, he married "a 26-year-old local girl called Frances." (What happened to his first wife, Christinna, is not known.) Frances P. Trumbull to Carus, May 25, 1898, Open Court Papers.

37. Trumbull, The Trial, p. 75; "Wheelbarrow," p. 39·

38. "Wheelbarrow," pp. 26-27.

39. While in London he stayed with his brother, Edward A. Trumbull, whom he persuaded to return with him to America. Edward settled in Union, Hardin County, Iowa, as a small farmer. Frances P. Trumbull to Carns, May 25, 1898, Open Court Papers.

40. Trumbull, "Aristocracy in America," Nineteenth Century, 18 (1885), 209- 17.

41. See Preface to the first edition, which bore the title: The American Lesson of the Free Trade Struggle in England (Chicago: Schumm and Simpson, 1884). It was enlarged and revised as The Free Trade Struggle in England (Chicago: Open Court Pub. Co., 1892). See also New York Times, May 10, 1894, p. 5, col. 3.

42. David, pp. 440-41; Boston, pp. 72-77.

43. Trumbull, The Trial, p. 75.

44. Ibid., i.e., the crime of the judges was "more fertile for evil" (a concept of medieval English law) than that of the anarchists. During this time Trumbull was also a frequent visitor to the imprisoned anarchists. See Chicago Tribune, Oct. 23, 1887, p. 11, col. 7.

45. David, pp. 315-16, 347-92.

46. Chicago Tribune, Nov. 10, 1887, p. 2, cols. 1-2.

47. Undated, unsigned draft of a letter by Carus (ca. 1894), in Open Court Papers.

48. "Judge Gary and the Anarchists," undated article from The Arena, and a pamphlet, Was It a Fair Trial? (n.p., n.d.), both in the Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield. See also n. 34. Lucy E. Parsons, wife of Albert Parsons, sold Was It a Fair Trial? on the streets of Chicago at 5¢ each. Trumbull gave her the $250 profit for her husband's defense. New York Times, Nov. 4, 1887, p. 1, col. 3; Boston, p. 73.

49. One of his most controversial columns was on the career of Allan Pinkerton, a former Chartist. Trumbull charged that Pinkerton, in founding a private detective agency, had disgraced the old Chartist movement and was responsible for the formation of "an army of illegal soldiers not under the command of the nation or the state, an imprudent menace to liberty; an irresponsible brigade of hired banditti, equipped with rifles and threatening every American workingman." Trumbull, "Current Topics," Open Court, 6 (1892), 3316. Edward Hegeler of La Salle, Illinois, wealthy industrialist and owner of Open Court, later criticized the article for its "fiery infelicities." Hegeler to Carus, May 24, 1892, Open Court Papers.

50. Trumbull, "Economic Conferences," Open Court, 2 (1888), 1104; "Wheelbarrow," p. 198.

51. See Thomas J. Morgan, "The Labor Question from the Standpoint of a Socialist," MS copy in Folder 27, Thomas J. Morgan Collection, Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois, Urbana. For Morgan's later career, see Ralph William Schamau, "Thomas J. Morgan and the United Labor Party of Chicago," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 66 (I973), 44-63.

52. R. H. Tawney, The Radical Tradition: Twelve Essays on Politics, Education and Literature, ed. Rita Hinden (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), p. 17.

53. Trumbull, "Economic Conferences," p. 1106; "Wheelbarrow," p. 203.

54. Tawney, p. 17.

55. "Wheelbarrow," p. 88.

56. "The Sermon," Open Court, 8 (1894), 4080.

57. This rough draft, which is unsigned and undated, has many interlineations in Carus's hand. Whether a final copy or any other such request on behalf of Trumbull's family was ultimately sent to Washington is not known. The letter is in the Open Court Papers and is quoted by permission of the Edward C. Hegeler Foundation, which holds literary rights. See n. 29.

58. In addition to his widow, Trumbull left a daughter, Alma; four sons - Matthew, Jr., Casper, Barnard, and Ellsworth; and a stepdaughter, Mrs. Florence English. Johnson Brigham, Iowa: Its History and Its Foremost Citizens (Chicago : S. J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1915), I, 385-86.

59. Trumbull suffered from Bright's disease, a kidney ailment.

60. Trumbull was described by a book critic as "a prominent and successful Chicago lawyer"; see clipping from Hayes Valley Advertiser (San Francisco), April 4, 1891, in Open Court Papers.

61. "A Review of 'Wheelbarrow,''' Open Court, 4 (1890), 2632; the review consisted of extracts from Harney, "The Career of an Old Chartist," Weekly Chronicle (Newcastle, England).




OPPOSITE
The Eight Hour Association, organized in Chicago in 1885, drew support from
socialists, labor unions, and rank-and-file workers. The four-page pamphlet, of which
this is the cover, is held by the Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield.