[1] Mayor's Court of Philadelphia (1806), reprinted in John R. Commons, Ulrich B. Phillips, Eugene A. Gilmore, Helen L. Sumner, and John B. Andrews, A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, (Cleveland: The A.H. Clark Company, 1910-11), 59-248. The British precedent is Rex v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge, 8 Modern 10 (K.B., 1721).
[2] Pullis was rejected in Commonwealth v. Hunt, 4 Metc, 111 (1842). See Walter Nelles, Commonwealth v. Hunt, 32 Colum. L. Rev. (1932), 1166-69 and Leonard W. Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw: The Evolution of American Law, 1830-1860, (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 183-206. Yet as Barry F. Helfand notes, Hunt was soon distinguished by other courts; thus prosecutions for conspiracy continued for many decades. When combined with later labor injunctions (i.e., In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895)), these two legal doctrines were effective in suppressing labor organizations. The pro-labor characterization of Hunt was questioned by Wythe Holt, Labour Conspiracy Cases in the United States, 1805-1842: Bias and Legitimation in Common Law Adjudication, 22 Osgoode Hall L.J. (1984), 643-653.
[3] Images of Violence in Labor Jurisprudence: The Regulation of Picketing and Boycotts, 1894-1921, 37 Buff. L. Rev. (1988), 5.
[4] Id.
[5] Walter Nelles, The First American Labor Case. 41 Yale L.J. (1931), 166. Parallels can be drawn between that time and the present, in which globalization is upsetting the conditions of community life as fundamentally as did the Industrial Revolution.
[6] The work day for the Cordwainers was sunrise to sunset for less then $10 a week. Nelles, The First American Labor Case, 167.
[7] Id.
[8] Holt, Labour Conspiracy Cases in the United States, 593.
[9] See R.S. Wright, The Law of Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements, (Philadelphia: The Blackstone Publishing Company, 1887).
[10] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 236.
[11] Nelles, "The First American Labor Case," 168 and 170-173.
[12] Id. at 169.
[13] Eric Foner, Why is There No Socialism in the United States? 17 Hist. Workshop J. (1984), 63.
[14] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 132.
[15] Id.
[16] Id. at 145.
[17] See Richard J. Bonnie, Anne M. Coughlin, John C. Jeffries, Jr., and Peter W. Low, Criminal Law (Westbury, NY: Foundation Press, 1997), 595-632.
[18] Holt, Labour Conspiracy Cases in the United States, 601.
[19] Id. at 594.
[20] Id. at 602-605.
[21] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 162. See Holt, Labour Conspiracy Cases in the United States, 613-615.
[22] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 95.
[23] Id. at 90.
[24] Id. at 100.
[25] Id. at 92.
[26] Note that the Supreme Court, in a string of "right not to associate" cases, has repeatedly rejected this argument. See Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209 (1977). "Right to work" laws exist in many states where legislatures-by fiat and with court approval-have outlawed union organization on the grounds that workers have a "right" to not associate with a union.
[27] Id. at 139.
[28] Id.
[29] Id. at 93.
[30] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 150.
[31] Id. at 151.
[32] Id.
[33] The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Guilded Age, 4 Wisconsin Law Review (1985), 816.
[34] Id.
[35] Id.
[36] Note, as with the democracy of Ancient Greece, citizenship in the early United States was rigidly constrained. See Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991).
[37] Forbath, "The Ambiguities of Free Labor," 768.
[38] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 135.
[39] These were Shay's Rebellion (1786), The Whisky Rebellion (1794), and Fries Rebellion (1788). See United States v. Mitchell, 26 F.Cas.1277 (1795); Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 89-121; Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whisky Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11-27; and http://www.jamesmannartfarm.com/friesreb1.html.
[40] In the early 1780s, the short-lived State of Franklin was created in the area of what is now Tennessee. Leaders of the former colonies in that region, alienated by federal economic policy and by the ineffectiveness of the new national leadership in controlling the Native American population, petitioned to join the Spanish empire. By 1789, however, the territory came under U.S. control. See A Dictionary of American History, (Blackwell Reference, 1995).
[41] For a theoretical discussion of "the people" as a rhetorical topos, see Michael C. McGee, In Search of "The People": A Rhetorical Alternative. 61 Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975), 235-49.
[42] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 221.
[43] Kirk W. Fuoss, "Community" Contested, Imagined, and Performed: Cultural Performance, Contestation, and Community in an Organized-Labor Social Drama. 15 Text and Performance Quarterly (1995), 93.
[44] Transforming Rhetoric Through Feminist Reconstruction: A Response to the Gender Diversity Perspective. 20 Woman's Studies in Communication (1997), 124.
[45] See Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999), 168-169.
[46] Foss, Griffin, and Foss, "Transforming Rhetoric," 124.
[47] Commonwealth v. Pullis, 235.
[48] Id.
[49] See David Bain, Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, (New York: Viking Press, 1999), 675-710. By 1900, the accumulated assets of the various railroads constituted 10% of all U.S. wealth. Herbert Hovenkamp, Regulatory Conflict in the Gilded Age: Federalism and the Railroad Problem, 97 Yale Law Journal (1988), 1018.
[50] Vegelahn v. Guntner 167 Mass. 92, 44 N.E. 1077 (1886), reprinted in Archibald Cox, Derek Curtis Box, Robert A. Gorman, and Matthew W. Finkin, Labor Law: Cases and Materials 11th ed. (New York: The Foundation Press, 1991), 23. For a discussion of this dissent, see Avery, Images of Violence in Labor Jurisprudence, 39-41.
[51] Discipline & Punish, (New York: Vintage, 1979), 276.
[52] Howard Zinn, Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order, (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 4.
[53] Id.