Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815-1880In this intriguing and innovative work, James D. Schmidt examines federal efforts to establish "free labor" in the South during and after the Civil War by exploring labor law in the antebellum North and South and its role in the development of a capitalist labor market. Identifying the emergence of conservative, moderate, and liberal stances on state intervention in the labor market, Schmidt develops three important case studies--wartime Reconstruction in Louisiana, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Freedmen's Bureau--to conclude that the reconstruction of free labor in the South failed in large part because of the underdeveloped and contradictory state of labor law. The same legal principles, Schmidt argues, triumphed in the postwar North to produce a capitalist market in labor. |
Contents
The Right to Quit | 7 |
THREE | 70 |
Northern Principles Go South93 | 93 |
The Mutation of FreeLabor Law | 122 |
FIVE | 128 |
Southern Reactions and Reformulations | 165 |
The Northern Reconstruction of FreeLabor Law | 194 |
CONCLUSION | 217 |
Law and Social Change | 237 |
Notes | 243 |
| 301 | |
Common terms and phrases
African Americans agents Alabama antebellum antebellum period apportionment apprenticeship argued arrest artisans assistant commissioner beggars Black Codes bourgeois BRFAL-AL BRFAL-SC capitalist labor Charities Civil County discipline discourse elite emancipation employers employment enforce entire contracts entirety farm former slaves free labor free-labor law Freedmen's Bureau freedom freedpeople hired Ibid ideology idleness Illinois indentures industrial January July jurists Justice Kiddoo labor contracts labor law labor market labor power liberal Liedtke litigation Louisiana Massachusetts master ment middle-class northern Oliver Otis Howard overseers paupers Pennsylvania Pinkerton plantation poor laws poorhouse postwar poverty prewar punishment radical Reconstruction reformers regulations Report Republican right to quit role rules Saxton servants servitude Session Laws slavery social society South Carolina southern courts Southern Planter state's statutes Supreme Court Swayne Texas Thirteenth Amendment tion tramp laws tramps Tribune University Press vagrancy laws Wager Swayne wages wartime whites William workers York York Tribune