ABSTRACT
William Sylvis (1828-1869) was born in central Pennsylvania into an impoverished working-class family, the second of a dozen children. He was hired out, at the age of eleven, to the home of a prosperous state legislator, where he did chores for room and board for a period of five years. He had access to modest formal schooling, and to his employer’s library, as well as exposure to ideas and information on political issues of the day, before returning home, where his father-a skilled wagon-maker-had finally succeeded in establishing his own shop. Rejecting his father’s trade as a wagon-maker, in the industrializing economy of the northern United States, Sylvis decided to become a skilled mechanic in the iron industry. Marrying in 1852, he moved his family to Philadelphia a few years later, where he secured a job in an iron foundry. According to his brother, it was in this period of transition that, “he became a great reader and student of politics, and especially of the elementary principles of political economy.”
