Reviewed Work: Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 330, $14.80.
In Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, Robert Steinfeld examines the development of free labor ideology in the nineteenth century. More specifically, he attempts to breakdown the historiographical binary opposition between free and coerced labor. Steinfeld muddies the waters by showing that all laborers in the nineteenth century experienced varying degrees of coercion, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary.
Steinfeld wants to debunk the “traditional wisdom” that has drawn a sharp line between free and unfree labor. He suggests we “think about labor relations in terms of degrees of coercive pressure” (16). In short, wage laborers, contract workers, and slaves all experienced different degrees of pecuniary and non-pecuniary pressures. Therefore, the judgment about “where to draw the line to separate free from coerced labor turns out not to be a judgment about whether the labor is voluntary or compelled but rather a judgment about what kinds of coercive pressures are legitimate and illegitimate in labor relations” (16). This approach is persuasive to a point.
Steinfeld argues that all workers are forced to choose between unpleasant alternatives in labor. For wageworkers, this might entail working under less than stellar conditions or starving and being homeless. For slaves, this meant either death or engaging in backbreaking labor. Such an assessment leads him to argue that where we draw the line between free and unfree labor “is arbitrary” (15). I agree that free wage laborers, contractual workers, and slaves were almost always in constant conflict with their employers/owners. However, Steinfeld claims, “The choices presented in slavery were normally vastly harsher than the choices presented in free wage labor, so we may rightly say that the degree of coercion in one form is generally vastly greater than in the other…but we have to say either that both are involuntary in different degrees or that both involve free choice of a lesser evil (15, emphasis mine).
In my opinion, the non-pecuniary pressures (specifically physical violence) impressed on human chattel is not just more extreme, but completely different. This issue touches on one of the more controversial debates in American historiography: what fundamentally changed for Africans after emancipation? After reading Steinfeld’s work, I believe he would say nothing; it only lessened the harshness of their labor situation. In my view, however, something fundamentally did change with emancipation. Africans gained some ownership over themselves and their labor; they were by definition no longer chattels. As a scholar of anti-slavery, this is one question that I will continue to wrestle with for the foreseeable future.
Outside of this issue, Steinfeld correctly points out that workers continually faced labor situations based on coercion. In England, employers used penal sanctions to control their workers, while in the United States employers threatened their workers with wage forfeiture if they did not fulfill their labor agreements. In other words, Steinfeld poses the question: how free was free labor?
Steinfeld argues that our modern conceptions of “free labor” do not apply to nineteenth century Anglo-American and European laboring worlds. In England, workers who breached their labor contracts faced imprisonment and hard labor. In the United States, workers who absconded or left their jobs were not paid, and their families (in Europe) were held financially responsible for their debts. By the 1860s, however, labor organizations began lobbying on behalf of workers. In England, they demanded for shorter contracts (from annual to fortnight, monthly, or minute contracts) and the removal of penal sanctions. This led to the 1875 Employers and Workman Act, which abolished the Master and Servant acts, and made it more difficult for employers to use penal sanctions. It is important to note that the United States followed a different path, where legal sanctions were not available for employers. Instead, they threatened their employees with forfeiting their wages if they did not follow through on their contractual obligations. In 1908, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bailey v. Alabama (1908) that involuntary servitude violated the liberties of Americans, influencing African Americans.
Steinfeld’s work raises many questions about nineteenth-century free labor ideology. More specifically, how activists in both the United States and Britain used the notion of free labor to further their anti-slavery crusade. Did their beliefs in the superiority of free labor over slave labor include some form of coercion? How did abolitionists reconcile the visions of free labor espoused by Hume, Smith, and Burke, with the reality of capitalism’s need for laborers, usually gained through coercive tactics? Did employers and planters exploit the free labor ideology for their own purposes? Most importantly, how does Steinfeld’s work complicate Richard Huzzey’s anti-slavery pluralism argument? Did employers seriously value the core anti-slavery principles that Huzzey argues remained relevant throughout the Victorian Era? If so, they did a horrible job of showing it.
Steinfeld’s Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor provides a detailed examination of common and positive laws, regarding labor, individual court cases dealing with employers and employees, and the political, social, and economic debates surrounding free labor in the nineteenth century. His work challenges the traditional binary opposition of free versus unfree labor, and forces scholars rethink nineteenth-century labor relationships in England and the United States.