Thomas Skidmore (reformer)

Thomas Skidmore (August 13, 1790 - August 7, 1832) was an American politician and radical political philosopher. Skidmore is best 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 leaders of the party on the grounds of Skidmore's excessive radicalism and unbending personality. Skidmore went on to establish an even less successful political organization in 1830, known as the Agrarian Party.

Skidmore was the author of three books, including an ambitious and controversial 1829 political treatise written against the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, The Rights of Man to Property! This work 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 the equalization of productive and personal property of the nation among its adult citizens.

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.

After his time as a teacher, Skidmore relocated to Wilmington, Delaware, and then Philadelphia, to try his hand as an amateur inventor. There he worked on a variety of ideas, including improvements in the gunpowder and paper manufacturing processes.

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