sometimes they were more severe. Coercion by the union did not
cease with the strike. Journeymen who were not members were
pursued with assiduity and energy as soon as they entered a town
and found work. The boycott was a method early used against
prison labor. New York stonecutters agreed that they would not
"either collectively or individually purchase any goods
manufactured" by convicts and that they would not "countenance"
any merchants who dealt in them; and employers who incurred the
displeasure of organized labor were "nullified."

The use of the militia during strikes presented the same
difficulties then as now. During the general strike in
Philadelphia in 1835 there was considerable rowdyism, and Michel
Chevalier, a keen observer of American life, wrote that "the
militia looks on; the sheriff stands with folded hands." Nor was
there any difference in the attitude of the laboring man towards
unfavorable court decisions. In the tailors' strike in New York
in 1836, for instance, twenty-seven thousand sympathizers
assembled with bands and banners to protest against the jury's
verdict, and after sentence had been imposed upon the defendants,
the lusty throng burned the judge in effigy.

Sabotage is a new word, but the practice itself is old. In 1835
the striking cabinet-makers in New York smashed thousands of
dollars' worth of chairs, tables, and sofas that had been
imported from France, and the newspapers observed the significant
fact that the destroyers boasted in a foreign language that only
American-made furniture should be sold in America. Houses were
burned in Philadelphia because the contractors erecting them
refused to grant the wages that were demanded. Vengeance was