Virginia Governor Fitzhugh Lee delivered a major address to the tenth annual convention of the Knights of Labor in Richmond, urging the massive labor organization toward moderation and compromise rather than confrontation. Speaking before roughly 1,000 delegates representing a million members gathered in the armory of the First Virginia Regiment, Gov. Lee praised the Knights' stated mission while carefully warning against class warfare. He invoked the founding fathers, the Bill of Rights, and principles of constitutional government to argue that labor should focus its rage on "incorporated rascality"—corrupt monopolies and moneyed corporations that bribe legislatures—rather than waging blanket war against all capital. "Make war against incorporated rascality and we will help you to ride it down," Lee declared, offering support against telegraph monopolies and corrupt judges while simultaneously cautioning workers not to prevent others from working on rejected terms or to deny good capitalists their due respect.

October 1886 placed the Knights of Labor at the absolute apex of American labor organizing—the order would begin its steep decline within months—making this convention a rare window into the movement's moment of maximum power and influence. The fact that a sitting governor addressed them so prominently shows the Knights' political weight; they'd recently organized massive strikes and had genuine ability to shape elections. Yet Lee's speech captures the fundamental tension paralyzing American labor in this era: workers wanted systemic change but lived in a nation whose founding mythology—constantly invoked by both sides—emphasized constitutional order, individual liberty, and compromise over radical redistribution. The Knights themselves, despite organizing both black and white workers together, were ultimately undermined by their reluctance to fully embrace political independence and by internal splits between radicals and moderates like Lee was appealing to.

• The convention hall was decorated with nothing but portraits of Master Workman Powderly and General Secretary Turner, plus photographs of the Joel Parker Association—starkly austere for a gathering of a million workers' representatives, suggesting both the movement's serious intent and its financial constraints.
• Gov. Lee explicitly divided capitalists into two moral categories: corrupt monopolists to fight and benevolent philanthropists to protect, even quoting that the generous would have 'heaven kissing spires' chronicling their donations and be 'sandalled by the very footsteps of progress'—a strikingly poetic defense of inequality if workers would just target the 'right' enemies.
• The masthead identifies the paper as 'Established 1850,' meaning this Savannah Morning News had survived the Civil War and Reconstruction—15 years of catastrophic regional upheaval—making it a rare institutional survivor of the antebellum South still publishing during the height of the labor movement.
• Lee invoked Washington Gladden's phrase that employers could choose to build 'hell' or 'heaven' in their factories based on whether they followed 'Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost' versus 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself'—reducing labor relations to a purely moral choice rather than structural economic problem.
• The speech warns workers that 'combinations on both sides' (labor unions and employer associations) risked paralyzing industry and creating 'a chasm that separates employer and employed' deeper than it currently was—a remarkable admission that class division wasn't yet seen as permanent or unbridgeable in 1886.

• T.V. Powderly, the Knights' General Master Workman whose portrait hung in that Richmond armory, was just 38 years old in 1886 but led the most powerful labor federation America had yet seen—within two years, the organization would splinter over his cautious leadership, with radicals breaking away to form the more militant American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers.
• Gov. Fitzhugh Lee was Robert E. Lee's nephew—here he was in 1886 essentially using Constitutional reverence and founding-father mythology to convince workers to accept class hierarchy as long as it wasn't *corrupt* class hierarchy, a rhetorical move that would dominate American labor debates for a century.
• The Knights of Labor admitted both skilled and unskilled workers, men and women, and notably both Black and white members at a time when AFL unions would become explicitly segregated—yet their radical inclusivity didn't save them from internal collapse, partly because moderate leaders like Powderly couldn't deliver the militant victories that kept coalitions together.
• Lee's warning about labor 'combinations' preventing willing workers from accepting lower wages foreshadowed the exact argument that would crush the 1886 Haymarket strike just months later in Chicago—courts would use similar 'liberty of action' rhetoric to jail labor leaders, making this speech an eerie preview of coming repression.
• The event occurred exactly as American manufacturing was exploding—the 1880s saw railroad mileage double and factory output triple—meaning these 1,000 delegates represented workers in industries growing so fast that wages actually had negotiating power, yet within a decade mechanization would flip that power dramatically back toward employers.