Thomas Skidmore

Title page of Thomas Skidmore's seminal 1829 book, The Rights of Man to Property! Thomas Skidmore (August 13, 1790 – August 7, 1832) was an American politician and political philosopher. He is remembered as the co-founder and leader of the Working Men's Party in New York when it first emerged in the fall of 1829. He was forced out of the organization shortly after its initial electoral campaign by moderate party leaders on the grounds of "excessive radicalism and unbending personality" . Skidmore went on to establish another short-lived political organization in 1830, known as the Agrarian Party.

Skidmore was the author of three books, including the 1829 political treatise written against the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, The Rights of Man to Property! which depicted a two-class society consisting of a propertied ruling class and a propertyless majority inevitably subjected to a sort of economic slavery which made true liberty impossible. It advocated a constitutional convention to abolish debt, end the right of inheritance, and bring about an equal distribution of productive and personal property of the nation among its adult citizens.

Biography

Early years

Thomas Skidmore was born on August 13, 1790, in rural Connecticut, in the town of Newtown, located in Fairfield County. Intelligent and literate from an early age, Skidmore began teaching at the local school at the age of thirteen, continuing in that capacity for five years. During this interval, Skidmore moved from town to town in pursuit of employment, including stops in Princeton and Bordentown, New Jersey; Richmond, Virginia; and Edenton and Newbern, North Carolina. There he worked on a variety of ideas, including improvements to the gunpowder and paper manufacturing processes.

Skidmore's cause was not aided by his prickly personality. Political opponents of the day characterized him as arrogant, overbearing, and intolerant of dissent, while political allies considered him self-assured and unwilling to accede to the ideas of others which he believed to be incorrect. "All else is quackery," Skidmore is remembered as saying of perspectives which diverged from his own.

Ouster and establishment of a new party

As the year 1829 drew to a close, a meeting of "mechanics and other workingmen" was held in New York City on December 29 to set the future policy of the party. The meeting was chaired by prominent local politician and Skidmore foe Henry G. Guyon, who refused to allow Skidmore to speak. Thomas Skidmore and his co-thinkers called a preparatory meeting soon thereafter, with a formal organizational meeting for a new political organization following on February 23, 1830. About 40 party adherents were in attendance to hear a long argument between Skidmore and Working Man's Advocate publisher Evans in which Skidmore charged that the official party had come to be dominated by the wealthy, while Evans accused Skidmore of having made himself "obnoxious to the great body of workingmen." The party nominated an individual from Orange County for governor, but he declined and no replacement was chosen. He published three books during the short interval between his emergence as a political figure in 1829 and his premature death at the age of 41 in 1832. Regarded as the most important of these was his first book, The Rights of Man to Property!

Such a situation was self-perpetuating and held the majority of citizens in a sort of economic thralldom in which true liberty was not possible, Skidmore argued. He wrote:

"Let the parent reflect, if he now be a man of toil, that his children must be, 99 cases in 100, slaves, and worse, to some rich proprietor... Let him not cheat himself with empty pretensions; for, he who commands the property of the State, or even an inordinate portion of it, has the liberty and the happiness of its citizens in his own keeping.... He who can feed me, or starve me; give me employment, or bid me wander about in idleness; is my master; and it is the utmost folly for me to boast of being anything but a slave."

To alleviate this fundamentally flawed state of affairs, Skidmore argued for the end of the right of inheritance and for a one-time equalization of property among adults.

Thomas Skidmore died August 7, 1832, during the cholera epidemic that swept through the city in that year. He was one week shy of his 42nd birthday at the time of his death.

Skidmore's 1829 book has been called the "first American synthesis of egalitarian and producerist ideas" and notable for its early advocacy of the idea that the producers of wealth were entitled to the whole value of that product — a fundamental economic article of faith which drove the 19th Century international socialist movement.

Footnotes

Works

The Rights of Man to Property! - Being a Proposition to Make It Equal Among the Adults of the Present Generation, and to Provide for Its Equal Transmission to Every Individual of Each Succeeding Generation on Arriving at the Age of Maturity. New York: Thomas Skidmore, 1829. Moral Physiology Exposed and Refuted. New York: Skidmore and Jacobs, 1831. Political Essays. New York: Skidmore and Jacobs, 1831.