In From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1988), Amy Dru Stanley examines the origins and meanings of contracts (labor and marriage) in the United States during the Age of Emancipation. There are two parts to this ambitious work. In the first, Stanley explores how abolitionists (during the antebellum and Civil War period) used debates over slavery to promote freedom of contracts. “The conflict over slavery,” Stanley argues, “infused the principles of self ownership, consent, and exchange with new ideological urgency” (17). For abolitionists, the ability to enter into a labor or marriage contract—something slaves could not do—became tantamount to “freedom.” In the second part, Stanley investigates how contracts, in many ways, came to resemble slavery. Following the Civil War, “reformers gave new moral legitimacy to labor compulsions that came perilously close to slavery” (137). This blurring of the lines between freedom and slavery during Reconstruction serves as the central focus of Stanley’s work.
The major problem for Americans during Reconstruction was distinguishing between “what was saleable and what was not” (xi). Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner, and Moon-Ho Jung, Stanley argues that the conflict over Reconstruction arose from the labor question (who would work for whom, and under what conditions). Stanley differs from these historians, however, by focusing on both the North and South, and examining other groups (often overlooked by historian during this period): northern hirelings, women, wageworkers, prostitutes and beggars. In each of her six chapters, Stanley returns to the major paradox of wage labor replacing chattel slavery, which was created by both the labor void left by abolition and the rise of industrial bourgeois capitalism. In other words, this paradox came form the “domestic dependencies of slavery,” which after emancipation was replaced by the “subjugation of workers under the wage system” (87). Although the differences between enslavement and freedom appear evident, Stanley questions what truly changed with the movement from bondage to contract.
Part of the novelty of Stanley’s argument is that she complicates the traditional “slavery versus freedom” binary so often evoked by Reconstruction historians. Instead, she offers a range of possibilities between slavery and freedom. Coercive labor contracts, vagrancy laws, home life, and marriage all served as arenas for the formation of these shades of freedom and slavery. Marriage, for instance, represented both a women’s ability to claim self-ownership (by entering freely into a marriage contract), and her acceptance of submission to her husband (creating a quasi-slave status as a dependent). As Helen Hawkins, a black nineteenth-century female writer, opined, “A husband’s claim to property in his wife violated inalienable rights much as did the slave master’s claim to his chattel property” (31). Marriage, for whites and blacks, provided no pretense for equality, but instead forced wives to become dependent on their husbands for survival. As abolitionists lobbied for African American women’s rights to enter marriage, they unknowingly raised new questions about women’s rights, once they entered into marriage (the ability to earn wages, hold jobs, and support themselves).
Labor served as another contested arena for contracts and free labor ideologies. Abolitionists argued that all people deserved the right to own and sell their labor as they pleased. They believed that “slave emancipation would convert freedmen into sovereign, self-owning individuals” (29). While proslavery advocates, such as George Fitzhugh, suggested that free labor and free markets would only support the strong while crushing the weak. Put in a different light, the institution of slavery reduced the pressure placed on the white working classes, and prevented their exploitation. As free wage labor replaced slavery, Stanley acutely demonstrates how coerced labor contracts came to closely resemble chattel slavery, favoring the employer over the employee. True enough, but I am still skeptical of Stanley’s conflation of chattel slavery to wage slavery. For me, there is a significant difference between buying and selling humans versus buying and selling one’s labor. I feel that Stanley over exaggerates this connection, which in turn, makes her conclusions problematical.
Stanley draws heavily on Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom and Reconstruction (she cites him numerous times, usually regarding the Freedman’s Bureau actions in the South). Stanley also extends W.E.B Du Bois’ “revolutionary argument” in Black Reconstruction. In the postbellum United States, emancipation dramatically changed the relationships between various groups. As Du Bois suggests, Reconstruction led to significant changes in the relationships between whites and blacks. Stanley, however, goes further and argues that the relationships between whites and blacks were not the only thing that changed, but also the relationships between men and women, northerners and southerners, and laborers and employers. She connects these changes by demonstrating how they represented the movement away from bondage and towards contract. In other words, the shift from slavery to wage system raised new questions about the roles of men, women, whites, blacks, laborers, and employers in postbellum society. In short, Stanley, like many other historians, argues that labor question, specifically the movement away from bondage and towards contract, was the central issues facing Americans during the Reconstruction era.