Benchmarking “free labor” in the age of emancipation

In her pivotal book, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, Amy Dru Stanley insightfully explores the ideological condition of the American labour market in the aftermath of the end of the Civil War. Notably Stanley remarks that the “American labor question was profoundly marked by the problem of slavery and emancipation.”(p.60) Carefully connecting the cause of the Civil War (the slavery question) with Reconstruction’s “labor question,” Stanley argues that “Americans turned to the labor question in the wake of abolition” because “they claimed that it followed inevitably from the slavery question.”(p.60) As such, Stanley deduces that the “labor questions in the postbellum North and South” can be “understood as one.”(p.61) In that both were “ideologically framed by the antithesis of slavery and freedom-the opposition between the principle of human chattel and the ideal of contract freedom.”(p.61)

Stanley’s argument is convincing. However, the end of slavery did not necessary define the meaning of “free labor.” In fact, the end of slavery arguably caused a crisis in “free labor” ideology. What exactly did “free labor” mean now that slavery did not exist?

This question increasingly became problematic in the industrial North, on the plantations of the South, as well as the overlands of the West.  Despite the different labour markets in the North, the South, and the West, during the late 1860s each region looked to answer their own “Labor Question” with Chinese labour.  In fact, I would argue that the subsequent debate over Chinese labour (the “Chinese Question”) during the mid 1870s witnessed a benchmarking of the meaning “free labor” across the United States – a process that would inform capital/labour relations into the twentieth century.

References

Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Was the credit-ticket scheme a form of slavery or even indentured servitude?

During the mid-late nineteenth century, the majority of Chinese immigrant workers in the United States were under the supervision of a labour agent.  According to Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, labour agents were “shrewd, business men” who essentially advised “their subordinates where employment can be found on the most favorable terms.”^⁠1 The labour agents themselves operated collectively under an organization known as the Chinese Six Companies.  Based in San Francisco, the Six Companies commanded a vast network of intermediaries in both China and California, possessing a virtual monopoly on the migrations of nearly all U.S. bound Chinese immigrants.^⁠2

Credit ticket scheme

The power of the Chinese Six Companies stemmed from the scheme that financed the immigration process. The majority of Chinese immigrants financed their voyage across the Pacific using the debt inducing credit-ticket scheme.  The cost of the voyage was approximately $40, a sum of money out of the reach of the average Chinese migrant.  The credit-ticket scheme effectively became the only way migrants could cross the Pacific. Notably, labour agents cut deals with the steamship companies making sure that no Chinese immigrant could return without the debt being repaid.  This meant that immigrants became financially tied to labour agents, empowering labour agents to redirect immigrants into unskilled labour, such as railroad construction.

Similarities to Indentured Servitude

To many contemporaries, the credit-ticket scheme reduced Chinese immigrants to the status of slaves or a derivative of slaves, “coolies.”^⁠3  However, I would argue that the credit-ticket scheme was essentially a reinvention of indentured servitude.^⁠4

Indentured servitude had been the dominant form of European migration to North America during the eighteenth century.  European migrants who could not pay the cost of the voyage to North America with their own money or were unable to borrow funds from other individuals or financial institutions, turned to indentured servitude to facilitate their migration to the New World.  Through merchants, migrants could borrow the cost of their passage as an advance against their future labour.^⁠5

The credit-ticket scheme followed a similar strategy in regards to repayment of the cost of passage. However, there are some noticeable differences between the two systems.

Differences to Indentured Servitude

The key difference between indentured servitude and the credit-ticket system was the method in repaying the cost of passage.  While indenture servitude rested on migrants being bound to an employer for a length of time in order to pay off the debt, the credit ticket system simply obligated Chinese immigrants to repay the debt rather than to serve a term of years.  As the U.S. Senate reported, “They [Chinese immigrants] often borrow money to get here, and agree to pay high premiums or interest, but the agreement is in the amount of money rather than in the number of years of service.”^⁠6  Frederick Low added, “If I am correct in my supposition, these contracts do not bind them to work for any specific length of time; they only bind them to refund a certain sum of money, and when that money is paid they are as free as you and I.”^⁠7

This still leaves the question, why was indentured servitude reinvented in the mid-late nineteenth century?

Debt and the creation of a new American workforce

The answer perhaps can be found with debt and the creation of a new American workforce. As Sven Beckert has shown in his recent study of cotton production after the Civil War, debt was a powerful tool in re-energising the labour force of the South and developing a new system of labour.  Through schemes such as sharecropping Beckert notes, “[cotton] cultivators were now nominally free,” but, “networks of credit … captured them in an ongoing cycle of indebtedness that required them to grow cash crops.”^⁠8

I believe a similar analogy can be used for understanding the role of the credit-ticket scheme and Chinese immigrants. For Chinese immigrants to escape the cyclical debt of the credit-ticket scheme, meant not only finding work but also sustaining employment. Interestingly, expectations regarding employment were low.  As one contemporary noted, the immigrants hoped “for the present at least, to perform the most common and unskilled labor.”^⁠9

References

¹ Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. Statement made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior of the Progress of the Work (Sacramento: H.S. Crocker & Co., Printers, 92 J Street, 1865).

² Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51.

³ See David Gouter, “Drawing Different Lines of Color: The Mainstream English Canadian Labour Movement’s Approach to Blacks and Chinese, 1880-1914,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2:1 (2005), 55-76.

⁴ Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books, 1940); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Jan Lucassen, “Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century: A Brief Overview,” in Free and Unfree Labor, ed., Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linder, and Jan Lucassen (Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993), 7-18.

⁵ D.W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History XLIV (1984), 16-17.

⁶ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 405.

⁷ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 83.

⁸ Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review (December 2004), 1428.

⁹ Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 55.

Railroad construction and the problem with white labour

The low wages and poor working conditions associated with railroad construction appealed to few white labourers across North America during the mid-late nineteenth century.  Contractors for the Central Pacific Railroad, the Mendocino Railroad, and the Canadian Pacific Railway all placed advertisements for white labour in respective local newspapers.  The respond was typically minimal.  An interview with the Mendocino Railroad contractor, Mr West Evans, revealed a lack of desire by white workers to take up railroad employment.  The type of work that made up the bulk of railroad construction simply did not appeal.  A transcript of the interview details why the contractor turned to Chinese labour to construct his railroad:

Q. Are you the West Evans who advertised extensively in a newspaper a year or two ago, for white laborers?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. What success did you meet with?

A. I got very few.

Q. How many did you advertise for?

A. I wanted a hundred.

Q. How many did you get?

A. Twenty or thirty. I sent more than a hundred up to work, but they would not work when they got there.

Q. For what reason?

A. They thought it was too hard work.

Q. Do you think there is a surplus of white laborers in the State?

A. I have not been able to employ it. I want men now and cannot get them.

Q. White men can do any work that the Chinamen could do?

A. Oh, yes; but, understand me, I tried to get white men to do this work and failed.^⁠1

 

Reference

¹ Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), xxii.