Although government policy during the course of expansion westward was dedicated to uprooting Native Americans and to eradicating those among them who proved uncooperative, there was simultaneous interest in their cultures and languages and some outrage over their treatment. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft extensively researched Native history and culture. His six-volume work on the subject appeared between 1851 and 1857. From the 1820s, the Native American was depicted heroically and tragically in fiction. As treaties were signed and tribes relocated, some Americans spoke out. On April 23, 1838, for example, as the federal government prepared to employ soldiers to remove unwilling Cherokees from Georgia and Tennessee to Oklahoma, in accordance with the questionably negotiated 1835 Treaty of Echota, Ralph Waldo Emerson emotionally protested in a letter to President Martin Van Buren "the terrific injury which threatens the Cherokee tribe." Much later in the century, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody espoused the cause of Native American education.
Labor began to speak on its own behalf and to protest intolerable working conditions. Textile workers had unionized by 1820. Weavers (both male and female) went on strike in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1824, over decreasing wages and increasing hours. In 1828, there was a strike of textile workers at a factory in Paterson, New Jersey, requiring the militia to quell violence. In 1842, the legality of labor unions and the right to strike was upheld by a Massachusetts Supreme Court decision. In the same year, legislation was signed in Massachusetts to limit the working hours of children under twelve. Similar laws followed elsewhere. In the 1840s, female mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, edited and wrote for their own magazine, the Lowell Offering. George Henry Evans founded the Workingman's Advocate and, in 1845, formed the National Reform Association for the benefit of labor. In 1860, Massachusetts shoemakers went on strike in response to the introduction of new machinery, which was being operated by children, thereby reducing the pay of skilled mature labor. (The shoemakers won a wage increase as a result of the strike
