From bondage to contract: wage labor, marriage, and the market in the age of slave emancipation

294 Pages·1998·5.28 MB·English

by  Amy Dru Stanley

From Bondage to Contract
In the era of slave emancipation no ideal of freedom had greater
power than that of contract. The antislavery claim was that the ne-
gation of chattel status lay in the contracts of wage labor and mar-
riage. Signifying self ownership, volition, and reciprocal exchange
among formally equal individuals, contract became the dominant
metaphor for social relations and the very symbol of freedom.
This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and
reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates,
jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn
the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free
society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom
were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life
on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these argu-
ments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social
existence could be rendered market commodities and which could
not. From Bondage to Contract reveals how the problem of distinguish-
ing between what was saleable and what was not reflected die ideo-
logical and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition
in the Soudi and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North.
Amy Dru Stanley is an Associate Professor of History at the Univer-
sity of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the American
Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellow-
ship Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Bar
Foundation.

From Bondage to Contract
Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market
in the Age of Slave Emancipation
Amy Dru Stanley
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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© Amy Dru Stanley 1998
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1998
Reprinted 2000,2003,2005,2007
Printed in the United States of America
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Stanley, Amy Dru.
From bondage to contract: wage labor, marriage, and the market in
the age of slave emancipation / Amy Dru Stanley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and Index.
ISBN 0-521^1470-9 (hb). - ISBN 0-521-03526-8 (pbk).
1. Labor - United States - History. 2. Slavery - United States -
History. 3. Contract labor - United States - History. 4. Marriage -
United States - History. 5. Women - United States - Social
conditions. I. Title.
HD8O66.S68 1998
306.'6'0973-dc21 98-39348
CIP
ISBN 978-0-521-41470-8 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-63526-4 paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
IV
To Craig, Tom, and Isaac

Contents
Preface page ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 Legends of Contract Freedom 1
2 The Labor Question and the Sale of Self 60
3 Beggars Can't Be Choosers 98
4 The Testing Ground of Home Life 138
5 Wage Labor and Marriage Bonds 175
6 The Purchase of Women 218
Afterword 264
Index 26g

Preface
Slave emancipation ended the contradictory coexistence of freedom
and slavery in the American republic. But a central paradox of eman-
cipation was nullifying the buying and selling of chattel slaves while
consecrating the market as a model of social relations among free
persons. For Americans who came of age in the postbellum era, the
problem was distinguishing between what was saleable and what was
not. That problem reflected die concurrence of abolition in the
South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in die Nordi, and was
grounded in changing circumstances of wage labor and home life
on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At stake were matters of
property, political economy, law, and morals. This book studies how
a generation who argued over the meaning of slavery and emanci-
pation drew on contract to describe die changes in their world and
to distinguish between die commodity relations of freedom and
bondage.1
1 On the momentous moral and cultural implications of the rise of free market rela-
tions, see J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York, 1985), 103-23;
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American
Thought, 1550-1750 (New York, 1986); C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory oj'Pos-
sessive Individualism; Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962); David Brion Davis, TheProblemof
Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1832 (Ithaca, 1975); Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1944); Sean
Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class
(New York, 1984); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of
the American Working Class (London, 1991); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood:
"Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977); Mary P. Ryan,
Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-186; (New
York, 1981); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the
Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York, 1983); Christine Stan-
sell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1780-1860 (New York, 1986); Jeanne
Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early
Republic (New York, 1990); Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside
in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America
(Chapel Hill, 1985); Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of
Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982); Thomas Bender, ed.,
The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation
(Berkeley, 1992); Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III, eds., The
Culture of the Market: Historical Essays (New York, 1993); Melvyn Stokes and Stephen