From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation

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.