Antislavery Activism in Lowell
Document 31

… when the [factory] laborer is shut up in a close room from ten to twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employments. This is not wrong, we shall be told; they come voluntarily and leave when they will. Voluntary! we might reply, much the worse if they do; but let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do they from mere choice leave their fathers' dwellings, the firesides where all their friends, where too their earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? . . . A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer. The whip which brings laborers to Lowell is NECESSITY. They must have money; a father's debts are to be paid, and aged mother is to be supported, a brother's ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will! . . . Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes them to Lowell and that keeps them there. Is this freedom? To our minds it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his tasks by the whip of the overseer or the wages of the Lowell Corporations. In either case it is not his own free will leading him to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question. …