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 Chinese Question 