Philadelphia Cordwainers Trial: 1806 - The Shoemaking Trade In Philadelphia

By the late 1700s, there had been major developments in the nature of the footwear trade. During the first decades in America, almost all leather shoes and boots were custom-made, and the men who made them were also the men who sold them. Gradually, though, some master craftsmen began to expand their business and came to employ journeymen craftsmen to fulfill orders. By the end of the eighteenth-century, some of these employers were expanding their business—selling a standardized line of wares in public markets and exporting on a wholesale-volume level to even distant cities. The nature of these new markets meant that the employers needed to produce a cheaper line of footwear; for this they wanted to pay slightly lower wages to the journeymen "cordwainers."

This name for shoe-and bootmakers has a curious etymology. It is a word that appeared in England in the Middle Ages and came from an anglicized pronunciation of a French word, cordoan, which referred to Cordovan leather; that in turn referred to Cordoba, Spain, whose fine-grained leather was regarded as the finest in Europe. Thus "cordwainers" were the men who worked with leather.

In 1794, numerous journeymen shoemakers in Philadelphia formed the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers with the goal of protecting their wages. During the next several years, they called several "turn-outs," what we today would call strikes, during which the society's members tried to prevent all journeymen from working for less than standard wages. Those journeymen who defied the society's request were known as "scabs," the same term still used today. Then in November 1805, the society called another major turn-out. Because of the alleged tactics used by some members against cordwainers who either had refused to join the society or who continued working as "scabs," eight of the leaders of the society were brought to trial in January 1806.