Thomas Skidmore (August 13, 1790 – August 7, 1832) was an American politician and radical

political philosopher Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, l ...

. Skidmore is best remembered as the co-founder and leader of the

Working Men's Party : ''For other organizations with a similar name, see Workingmen's Party (disambiguation).'' The Working Men's Party in New York was a political party founded in April 1829 in New York City. After a promising debut in the fall election of 1829, ...

in New York when it first emerged in the fall of 1829. He was forced out of the organization shortly after its initial electoral campaign by moderate leaders of the party on the grounds of Skidmore's excessive radicalism and unbending personality. Skidmore went on to establish another short-lived political organization in 1830, known as the Agrarian Party. Skidmore was the author of three books, including an ambitious and controversial 1829 political treatise written against the ideas of

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 18 ...

, ''The Rights of Man to Property!'' This work depicted a two-class society consisting of a propertied ruling class and a propertyless majority inevitably subjected to a sort of economic slavery which made true liberty impossible. It advocated a constitutional convention to abolish debt, end the right of inheritance, and bring about an equal distribution of productive and personal property of the nation among its adult citizens.

Biography

Early years

Thomas Skidmore was born on August 13, 1790 in rural

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

, in the town of Newtown, located in Fairfield County.

Edward Pessen Edward Pessen (1920–1992) was an American historian. Life Edeard Pessen was born to a working-class Jewish immigrant family in New York City. After army service Pessen completed undergraduate education (in 1947) and gained a PhD (in 1954) from Co ...

, "Thomas Skidmore, Agrarian Reformer in the Early American Labor Movement," ''New York History,'' vol. 35, no. 3 (July 1954), pg. 280. Intelligent and literate from an early age, Skidmore began teaching at the local school at the age of thirteen, continuing in that capacity for five years.Matthew S.R. Bewig, "Thomas Skidmore (1790-1832): Working Men's Parties," in Eric Arnesen (ed.), ''Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-class History: Volume 1, A-F.'' New York: Routledge, 2007; pg. 1259. During this interval Skidmore moved from town to town in pursuit of employment, including stops in

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and Bordentown,

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

;

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia, United States * Richmond, London, a part of London * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town in England * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, ...

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; and

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and Newbern,

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...

. After his time as a teacher, Skidmore relocated to

Wilmington, Delaware Wilmington ( Lenape: ''Paxahakink /'' ''Pakehakink)'' is the largest city in the U.S. state of Delaware. The city was built on the site of Fort Christina, the first Swedish settlement in North America. It lies at the confluence of the Christina ...

, and then

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, to try his hand as an amateur inventor.Pessen, "Thomas Skidmore, Agrarian Reformer in the Early American Labor Movement," pg. 281. There he worked on a variety of ideas, including improvements in the

gunpowder Gunpowder, also commonly known as black powder to distinguish it from modern smokeless powder, is the earliest known chemical explosive. It consists of a mixture of sulfur, carbon (in the form of charcoal) and potassium nitrate (saltpeter). ...

and paper manufacturing processes. Skidmore moved to New York City in 1819, where he would spend the rest of his life. He married in 1821 and worked in the city as a

machinist A machinist is a tradesperson or trained professional who not only operates machine tools, but also has the knowledge of tooling and materials required to create set ups on machine tools such as milling machines, grinders, lathes, and drilling ...

, gradually becoming involved in labor politics.

Political career

In 1829, he emerged as an important public figure at the center of the nascent New York City Working Men's Party, which fought for a ten-hour working day, the abolition of debtors' prison, universal public education, and expanded political

suffrage Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise, is the right to vote in representative democracy, public, political elections and referendums (although the term is sometimes used for any right to vote). In some languages, and occasionally i ...

, among other things. Skidmore's political ideas were radical for his time and brought him into conflict with others in the Working Men's Party of more moderate views. His thinking on inheritance and redistribution was high on the party's agenda during the successful electoral campaign of 1829, which won 31% of the vote and elected two state legislators under the party's banner. Soon however, the combative Skidmore provoked a reaction leading to his exclusion from the Working Men's Party. Previously critical of influential party leader

Robert Dale Owen Robert Dale Owen (7 November 1801 – 24 June 1877) was a Scottish-born Welsh social reformer who immigrated to the United States in 1825, became a U.S. citizen, and was active in Indiana politics as member of the Democratic Party in the Indian ...

and others for their promotion of policies not of direct benefit to the working class, Skidmore found himself isolated in December 1829 when Owen joined prominent party politicians Noah Cook and Henry Guyon in seeking his removal for excessive radicalism. Skidmore's cause was not aided by his prickly personality, which political opponents of the day characterized as arrogant, overbearing, and intolerant of dissent.Pessen, ''Uncommon Jacksonians,'' pg. 61. Political allies made these character traits into a virtue, casting Skidmore as self-assured but unwilling to accede to the ideas of others which he believed to be incorrect. "All else is quackery," Skidmore is remembered as saying of perspectives which diverged from his own.

Ouster and establishment of a new party

As the year 1829 drew to a close, a meeting of "mechanics and other workingmen" was held in New York City on December 29 to set the future policy of the party.Frank T. Carlton
"The Workingmen's Party of New York City: 1829-1831,"
''Political Science Quarterly,'' vol. 22, no. 3 (Sept. 1907), pg. 405. The meeting was chaired by prominent local politician and Skidmore foe Henry G. Guyon, who refused to allow Skidmore to speak. When Skidmore attempted to address the meeting without official sanction, he was howled down. Skidmore's

agrarianism Agrarianism is a political and social philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, smallholdings, and egalitarianism, with agrarian political parties normally supporting the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants ...

-oriented program was defeated and the communal education policies assigned primacy in the revised Working Men's Party program. Denied access to the floor at the December 29, 1829, meeting and thereby effectively "read out" of the party, Thomas Skidmore and his co-thinkers called a preparatory meeting soon thereafter, with a formal organizational meeting for a new political organization following on February 23, 1830.Carlton, "The Workingmen's Party of New York City," pg. 406. About 40 party adherents were in attendance to hear a long argument between Skidmore and ''Working Man's Advocate'' publisher Evans in which Skidmore charged that the official party had come to be dominated by the wealthy, while Evans accused Skidmore of having made himself "obnoxious to the great body of workingmen." Skidmore's new grouping was known as the Agrarian Party, which also called itself the "Original Working Men's Party." They nominated a full ticket for state as well as city office, including running Skidmore for

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

and his right-hand man, Alexander Ming, Sr., for State Assembly in the election of 1830.Carlton, "The Workingmen's Party of New York City," pg. 412. The party nominated an individual from

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for

governor A governor is an administrative leader and head of a polity or political region, ranking under the head of state and in some cases, such as governors-general, as the head of state's official representative. Depending on the type of political ...

, but he declined and no replacement was chosen. The result of the 1830 election was a crushing blow for the Working Men's Party dominated by Owen and Evans and Skidmore's Agrarian Party alike. The Working Man's Party had split again into a National Republican proxy "Clay Workingmen" and an Owen-Evans minority. Both were soundly demolished by the Tammany Hall Democrats, with Skidmore's Agrarian Party scarcely registering a pulse.

Ideas

Skidmore's contribution to the political movement of the late 1820s and early 1830s was primarily that of a political writer.Bewig, "Thomas Skidmore," pg. 1260. He published three books during the short interval between his emergence as a political figure in 1829 and his premature death at the age of 41 in 1832. Regarded as the most important of these was his first book, ''The Rights of Man to Property!'' Influenced by the most radical thinking to emerge from the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...

of 1789-1794, Skidmore's book was a challenge to the views of

regarding the "rights of man" and Jefferson's call for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for what he believed to be a shortsighted omission of the role of property in subverting political and judicial equality between citizens. Anticipating the views of

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

and others, in his 1829 book Skidmore depicted the world as one divided into two fundamental classes:

"...proprietors, and non-proprietors; those who own the world and those who own no part of it. If we take a closer view of these two classes, we shall find that a very great proportion even of the proprietors, are only nominally so; they possess so little, that in strict regard to truth, they ought to be classed among the non-proprietors."

Such a situation was self-perpetuating and held the majority of citizens in a sort of economic thralldom in which true

liberty Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom. In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society fr ...

was not possible, Skidmore argued. He wrote:

"Let the parent reflect, if he now be a man of toil, that his children must be, 99 cases in 100, slaves, and worse, to some rich proprietor... Let him not cheat himself with empty pretensions; for, he who commands the property of the State, or even an inordinate portion of it, has the liberty and the happiness of its citizens in his own keeping.... He who can feed me, or starve me; give me employment, or bid me wander about in idleness; is my master; and it is the utmost folly for me to boast of being anything but a slave."Skidmore, ''The Rights of Man to Property!'' pg. 388. Hyperbolic italicization in original removed and spelling modernized.

To alleviate this fundamentally flawed state of affairs, Skidmore argued for the end of the right of inheritance and for a one-time equalization of property among adults. His program was straightforward: all property in the United States should be divvied up and redistributed, in equal shares, to American citizens. From that point on, Americans would own their share as private property, and would relinquish it only when they died. Private inheritance would be abolished, and the wealth of the deceased would be pooled into a fund and reserved, in the future, for young people when they reached the age of 18. Upon reaching that age, all Americans would inherit a generous sum of money, understood as their birthright, to get them started in adult life. The mechanism for change advocated by Skidmore was the convocation of a

constitutional convention Constitutional convention may refer to: * Constitutional convention (political custom), an informal and uncodified procedural agreement *Constitutional convention (political meeting), a meeting of delegates to adopt a new constitution or revise an e ...

that would in one swoop abolish all debts and expropriate all property — productive and personal — on behalf of the state. Every citizen, regardless of gender or race, would be allotted an equal share of the combined property of the nation, with the system made permanent by the equal distribution of the property of the deceased to those attaining the age of majority. In addition to his redistributive ideas, Skidmore advocated state aid for child-rearing, the abolition of private charity, and the elimination of banks and corporate charters.

Death and legacy

During the last months before defeat in the election of 1830 and his untimely death in the summer of 1832, Skidmore published a newspaper called ''The Friend of Equal Rights,'' wrote letters to the editor of various New York City newspapers, and gave public lectures in an attempt to gain popular support for his deeply-held political and economic ideas.Pessen, "Thomas Skidmore, Agrarian Reformer in the Early American Labor Movement," pg. 282. Thomas Skidmore died August 7, 1832, during the

cholera epidemic Seven cholera pandemics have occurred in the past 200 years, with the first pandemic originating in India in 1817. The seventh cholera pandemic is officially a current pandemic and has been ongoing since 1961, according to a World Health Organizat ...

that swept through the city in that year. He was one week shy of his 42nd birthday at the time of his death. Skidmore's 1829 book has been called the "first American synthesis of egalitarian and

producerist Producerism is an ideology which holds that those members of society engaged in the production of tangible wealth are of greater benefit to society than, for example, aristocrats who inherit their wealth and status. History Robert Ascher traces ...

ideas" and notable for its early advocacy of the idea that the producers of wealth were not entitled to the whole value of that product — a fundamental economic article of faith which drove the 19th Century international socialist movement.

Footnotes

Works

''The Rights of Man to Property! - Being a Proposition to Make It Equal Among the Adults of the Present Generation, and to Provide for Its Equal Transmission to Every Individual of Each Succeeding Generation on Arriving at the Age of Maturity.''
New York: Thomas Skidmore, 1829. * ''Moral Physiology Exposed and Refuted.'' New York: Skidmore and Jacobs, 1831. * ''Political Essays.'' New York: Skidmore and Jacobs, 1831.