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

In the era of slave emancipation no ideal of freedom had greater power than that of contract. The antislavery claim was that the negation of chattel status lay in the contracts of wage labor and marriage. 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 1999 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 arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not. "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 arguments 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 distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North."--Jacket

This book explores the centrality of contract to debates over freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century America. It focuses on the contracts of wage labor and marriage, investigating the connections between abolition in the South and industrial capitalism in the North and linking labor relations to home life. Integrating the fields of gender and legal, intellectual and social history, it reveals how abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, laborers, lawmakers and others drew on contract to condemn chattel slavery and to measure the virtues of free society.

Contents......Page 8 Preface......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 16 Legends of Contract Freedom......Page 18 The Labor Question and the Sale of Self......Page 77 Beggars Can't Be Choosers......Page 115 The Testing Ground of Home Life......Page 155 Wage Labor and Marriage Bonds......Page 192 The Purchase of Women......Page 235 Afterword......Page 281 Index......Page 286 Amy Dru Stanley. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.