Here the daughters of the farmers and settlers did the work that formerly their mothers had done at home. Only they did it faster, by tending the machines all day long. At first the girls did not know that the employers might try to make the people in the factories work longer hours without any rest and adequate pay. Soon enough they found this out. But as the girls had inherited the independent spirit of their fathers and grandfathers, trouble began to brew. In December, 1828, four hundred girls in Dover, New Hampshire, formed a procession and marched out of the factory, in order to show their indignation at the growing oppression by their employers. They clad their complaints in verses, one of which ran: “Who among the Dover girls could ever bear The shocking fate of slaves to share!” Unorganized as they were at that time, they did not succeed in gaining all they desired. But five years later they walked out again, eight hundred strong, adopting resolutions stating that they had not been treated as “daughters of freemen” by their employers and the unfriendly newspapers. At the same time in Lowell, Mass., at a signal given by a Dover girl, two thousand girls, who had formed a “=Factory Girls’ Association=,” joined in a sympathy strike, marched around town and issued the following proclamation: [Illustration: SPINNERS IN THE COLONIAL TIMES. After a painting by Carl Marr, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ] “Union Is Power.” “Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our own unquestionable rights. We circulate this paper, wishing to obtain the names of all who imbibe the spirit of our patriotic ancestors, who preferred privation to bondage and parted with all that renders life desirable—and even life itself—to produce independence for their children. The oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us, and to gain their object they very gravely tell us of the pressure of the times; this we are already sensible of and deplore it. If any are in want of assistance, the ladies will be compassionate and assist them, but we prefer to have the disposing of our charities in our own hands, and, as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still. “All who patronize this effort we wish to have discontinue their labor until terms of reconciliation are made. “Resolved. That we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued to us as they have been. “Resolved, That none of us will go back unless they receive us all as one. “Resolved, That if any have not money enough to carry them home they shall be supplied.