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).

The origins of Coolieism

Interwoven throughout the debates over the “Chinese Question” and the “Labor Question” could be heard the term “coolie.” During the 1840s and 1850s, the term came to describe Chinese immigrants coerced to work in Cuba and Peru. In June 1847, several Cuban planters and a railroad company on the island started employing Chinese “coolies” as the supply of the Atlantic slave trade dried up. With the end of the African slave trade, Cuban planters fearful of a slave rebellion as revolutionary as the one in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) looked to contract Chinese labourers in order to stabilize the country’s socio-economic structure. The appearance of contracted Chinese labourers on plantations notably sharpened racial sensibilities and divided labour tasks according to skin colour. Rather than Cuba’s socio-economic structure collapsing, the contracting of Chinese labourers maintained power relations. Although the Chinese government attempted to outlaw the practice of enforced labour and the U.S. government banned “coolies” from entering the United States in 1862, during the 1860s and 1870s the term was increasingly used to describe the supposed slave-like status of Chinese immigrants to America.

References

Matthew Guterl, “After slavery: Asian labor, the American South, and the age of emancipation,” Journal of World History, 14:2 (2003), 209-242.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Chinese coolie labor in Cuba in the nineteenth century: Free labor or neo-slavery?” Slavery and Abolition, 14:1 (1993), 67-83.

Walton Look Lai, Indentured labor, Caribbean sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).