A Todmorden Man on Death Row – Sam Fielden and the Haymarket Riot of 1886

May 4th is May Day, the bank holiday and international holiday associated with the struggle for workers’ rights. Most people celebrate this day as a day off work, or to remember historical events that were important for such issues as the minimum wage, safe working conditions, and limits on working hours. In Todmorden we usually think of “Honest” John Fielden MP and his fight for the 8-hour day for women and children and for the improvement of conditions for the labouring classes. But there is another Fielden from Todmorden who played a part in a far more exciting, dangerous, and controversial May Day event which still divides people to this day: the 1886 Haymarket Riots in Chicago.

Sam Fielden in Joliet Prison, 1887

Haymarket was a pivotal event in American trade union and workers’ rights history. On the evening of May 4th, a number of union activists were giving a speech in Haymarket Square around 6pm. The months and years leading up to this had seen a boom in the immigrant population of Chicago, and a growing disparity in the working and living conditions of working class people and the “barons of industry” whose monopolies and political and media influence made it difficult for anyone to improve their situations. Strikes had been happening on and off for years, but both unskilled labourers and crafts guilds were beginning to coordinate and put real pressure on wealthy business owners to raise wages and shorten working days. If you’ve ever read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, you’ll know what sort of genuine “health and safety nightmares” were happening. Even the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871 can be traced to working and living conditions – most people could only afford to rent pinewood cabins, which had been hastily built in close proximity to each other, and it was these wooden houses that caught and spread the fire quickly to devastating effect. Chicago was a wonderful place to be if you were a Gilded Age industrialist, but a harsh and often deadly place for the common worker.

On the night of the 4th, the police arrived en masse to break up the large group of people listening to the speeches being given. The police chief, Captain Bonfield, ordered the crowd to disperse immediately. As the man who had just finished speaking got down off the cart he was stood on, suddenly, a bomb exploded in the middle of the crowd. The police panicked and began shooting indiscriminately. Six policemen and an unknown number of civilians died that night from wounds sustained by the bomb or by bullets. Eight men were arrested and hastily charged with murder. The events of that night caused a split in the workers rights movement between those who condemned the violence and those who asked what other choice did workers have and set the movement back by decades by eroding public sympathy for unions and strikers. One of the men who was later executed, Albert Parsons, was at the time one of the most well-known and active trade unionists in America. Another one of those men – the last man giving a speech, who was stepping down when the bomb went off – was a Todmorden man named Sam Fielden. Because this was America’s “trial of the century” there was endless newspaper coverage of the affair, which lasted from May 1886 through to the eventual pardon of the final three remaining defendants in 1893. To say we know much about Sam from that, though, would be misleading – the eight anarchists were charged with murder and sentenced to death partly due to lobbying by the editor of the Chicago Tribune! – and the newspaper coverage was one of the things later condemned by the state governor as prejudicial. We know more about his life and philosophy from the autobiography he wrote while awaiting sentencing and from the various speeches he made in court and after his pardon which were recorded and distributed all across America and the world as part of the effort to remember the “Haymarket Martyrs”.

Engraving entitled “The Battle of Haymarket” produced for Harper’s Weekly after the arrests in 1886 and widely circulated. The man on the cart shouting is supposed to be Sam Fielden.

So who was Sam Fielden? No connection to John Fielden MP, Sam was born in Walsden in 1847. His father Abraham had been active in the Chartist movement and was a well-known and well-regarded progressive in the town. His mother, Alice (Jackson) Fielden, died of a consumptive illness when Sam was 10 years old. In his autobiography Sam marked this moment as one of the greatest influences on his life course, and later on it is reasonable to assume that it was one of the memories that caused him to become active within the trade union and Anarchist movement in Chicago.

Sam grew up in his charismatic father’s shadow, but happily so. He went to work for Fielden Brothers in the weaving sheds at a young age, and wrote about his experiences working there. Work was hard, and dangerous, but well paid until the cotton famine hit during the American Civil War. Sam and his father were outspoken abolitionists, and the good reception Sam gained from his small speeches set him on his course to become an active preacher on the Methodist circuit when he was 18.Sam eventually decided that he wanted to see the world, and felt he was talented enough both as a speaker and a labourer to make it, so with the help of the local Methodists he boarded a ship for America in 1868. After first finding work here and there on the east coast, he travelled into the centre of the country bound for Chicago, preaching along. He had heard much about the opportunities there and wanted to be part of the growth of this important city. Once he arrived, though, he found the reality very different. He was able to make a decent enough wage at first, though, and in 1879 he returned to Todmorden briefly to visit his family and to marry his sweetheart, Sarah Gill, a fellow weaver at Fielden Bros. at Waterside. Sarah returned to Chicago with him and they had a daughter in 1884, Alice – named after Sam’s mother.

Marriage notice from Todmorden and District News, 19th Dec. 1879

By 1886 conditions in Chicago had hit rock bottom and both the trade union and Anarchist movements had gathered popularity as a way of responding to the terrible poverty most were enduring and to give the working class a little influence against men who were so wealthy that they had free influence over the police, newspapers, and even government. In his autobiography Sam describes various moments that horrified him into turning his oratorial efforts away from Methodism and towards Anarchism;

“In this city of Chicago children are working at very tender ages. Going home one very cold night in the winter of 1884, two little girls ran up to me and begged of me to go home with them. I asked them why. They said: ‘A man down there has been offering us money.’ It was 7 o’clock at night and snowing; I asked them where they had been so late. They said: ‘We have been working in such a store.’ Children, babies turned out from their mother’s heart to make a living, their fathers perhaps dead – in this case they were. The civilization that will not and cannot support a widow so that she will not have to turn her children out to such temptations as that is not worth respecting, and the man who will not try to change it is no man. Talking with those children as I went home with them, for they lived not far from me, I could notice the comparative boldness in the two children, they being of the same age. One of them told me she had been working three years and the other a year. There was that shyness, at least something remained of it, the coyness, which is about a child of tender age to a stranger, about the one that had only been away from the hearth-side one year; but in the other one, that had been away three years, there was not a particle of it, and she was a head shorter than the child that had the advantage of living at home two years more of her existence.”

People living in poor conditions in Chicago were, just as in London, liable to suffer from chest complaints and early mortality due to the smog and pollution settling over everything, every day. Sam, faced with the fear of Alice being poorly in the same way as his mother and with the general threats to poor children in the city at this time, as well as his horror at religious leaders promoting capitalism when all around him he could see the failures of it in its most extreme form, forsook his faith and embraced Anarchism even more fervently. Meanwhile, democratic attempts to improve working and living conditions continued to be undermined by industrialists with political influence. This led to arguments within the trade union movement about whether continuing to try and work within the existing system was best (incrementalism) or whether revolution was now what would be needed to bring about real change.

Then, the explosion on the night of May 4th threw the city and Sam’s world into chaos. In what historians have now deemed a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sam found himself fingered as not just an accidental accessory to murder but culpable under a hastily rewritten conspiracy and incitement law that allowed all eight trade unionists and Anarchists to be tried for the six police deaths, despite a host of witnesses who could alibi all but one as being entirely unconnected to the explosion that night. All but one of the eight defendants was sentenced to death. Sam was one of two whose sentences were commuted to life imprisonment only days before the other four were executed (the one man who could be linked to bomb-making killed himself in his cell shortly beforehand with a small explosive which was smuggled in by a visitor).

While newspapers alternately described Sam as a “shaggy, unkempt man” and “something of a big galoot”, poor Sarah found herself repeatedly marked out as appearing pale, unwell, and rather unfairly “unattractive”. She was consistently described by newspapers as appearing to be of a nervous temperament and fearful; unsurprising given that her husband was one of the most hated men in America, and she was pregnant with their son Samuel Henry (“Harry”) during the trial and for many of the subsequent appeals which were heavily publicised. A profile of the “wives of the Haymarket rioters” written by Teresa Dean, a woman “female interest” reporter in Chicago, has an interesting aside in the small piece about her visit to Sarah – namely, that Alice was slightly unwell when she visited, and Sarah was quoted as saying that she was going to have to make sure Alice saw a doctor as “he would not like it if I did not” – another reference to Sam’s likely anxiety over his mother’s namesake suffering from a fatal, or even just avoidable, chest complaint. Alice is described as having a perfect angelic face, black hair and bright blue eyes. Harry is described as seeming bright and lively. Both children are completely silent in the presence of the uninvited guest. No photographs of Sarah, Alice or Harry seem to exist but one of Sam, taken after his arrest, shows a man who could easily be walking down the streets of Todmorden today.

Photo taken by the Chicago Police Department, 5th May 1886

Undoubtedly the long, public trial, her pregnancy, the negative press and the fear of various fates befalling her husband was hard on Sarah, but she maintained her loyalty to Sam publicly; never failing to stand by him when interviewed, and even years afterwards attending the yearly anniversary commemorations of the executed men where fundraising would take place for their widows and the wives of the remaining prisoners. Not all the wives and widows always went, but Sarah always did. Sam was described consistently as a model prisoner and was allowed regular visits from Sarah, Alice and Harry during the 7 years he spent in prison.

The Inter Ocean (a Chicago newspaper), 27th August 1886

The Todmorden News and Hebden Bridge Advertiser, at the time, followed the American papers in its treatment of him. Described as being known as “Sam-o-Ab’s-o-Pex’s” he is said to have been sending home “mad, wicked Socialistic prints” to his friends for years, and that this is an example of “a little knowledge being a dangerous thing”. The tone changes, however, in 1893. Why? Because after years and years of lobbying from former city mayors, governors, judges, and even one former juryman, a newly elected Illinois governor pardoned Sam along with the remaining two men who were still imprisoned. The details of Inspector Bonfield accepting bribes, of Pinkerton operatives being found to have incited riots and started violence around the country to cause ill-will against trade unionists, jury members’ employers instructing them to find the men guilty and to support the death sentence, and the repeated violations of the men’s constitutional rights during the trial all led him to declare that none of the eight could be linked to what happened that night and ought to never have been tried for murder in the first place. Sam was free to go home to Sarah and his two children and resume a normal life. The Todmorden Advertiser refers to him having “lost his taste for anarchic dissertation during his confinement”. But would a normal life be possible, and did he really lose his preaching spirit

At first Sam continued to work for the stone masons for whom he had worked both before his arrest and while he was in prison, and he spoke a few times at memorial events for the “Haymarket Martyrs”, but he did not feel that Chicago was safe both because of his reputation and because of the living conditions that working people still struggled under. He was reported to have gotten a small inheritance from a relative in Todmorden, and with that money he bought a horse ranch in Colorado and moved his whole family to the country. He, Sarah, Alice and Harry lived on their ranch together until the last one of them, Alice, died in 1975. After their experiences in Chicago it seems the little family decided that they would not choose to be apart from each other ever again. As far as can be seen, none of them ever returned to Todmorden.

1900 US Census – the Fieldens in Colorado

It seems fitting from a library perspective to end with these words from Sam Fielden at his sentencing hearing in October 1886.

“If I am to be convicted – hanged for telling the truth – the little child that kneels by its mother’s side on the West Side today, and tells its mother that she wants her papa to come home, and to whom I had intended, as soon as its prattling tongue should commence to talk, to teach that beautiful sentiment – that child had better never be taught to read; had better never be taught that sentiment – to love truth. If they are to be convicted of murder because they dare tell what they think is the truth, then it would be better that every one of your school houses were reduced to the ground and not one stone left upon another. If you teach your children to read, they will acquire curiosity from what they read. They will think, and they will search for the meaning of this and that. They will arrive at conclusions. And then, if they love the truth, they must tell to each other what is truth or what they think is the truth. That is the sum of my offending.”

More about Sam Fielden, and many of the events that happened during his childhood that informed the path he took later in life, will be discussed on our “History Out Loud” podcast sometime this summer – if you don’t already follow it, it’s well worth a listen (if we do say so ourselves). You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Anchor FM, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.