“Free Soil, Free Labor, and Fremont” was
an early rally cry for the emergent Republican Party in the mid-1850s. To many
of its Northern proponents, the idea of free labor provided not only a better
economic model, but also staked claim to a moral high ground over the labor
system practiced in the 15 slave states. As most Northerners perceived it, allowing
laborers the ability to choose their profession and their employer, and to earn
their living by the sweat of their brow or by their ingenuity and intellect
without competition from slave labor was clearly superior. Northerners also
felt that slave labor hindered innovation and discouraged industrial trades.
However, as Brian P. Luskey informs us in Men
is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America, the free
labor system was not without its fair share of flaws, too.
Organized into six chapters, Men is Cheap also includes a helpful contextual
introduction and fitting conclusion. In this study we see that the Civil War
provided a good testing ground for the free labor system. As the war progressed
political decisions and military actions produced events that offered certain individuals
and organizations, who were perhaps more interested in personal gain than
national advancement, numerous opportunities to cash in. Corruption involving
Union war material manufacturing contracts have long been part of Civil War
scholarship, but until recently, labor fraud in relation to the Union cause has
largely remained out of the spotlight.
Focusing heavily on what were then called
“intelligence offices,” which operated somewhat like a shadier version of today’s
employment agencies, Luskey exposes a clear contradiction between the ideals of
free labor, and how under the pressures of wartime necessity it sometimes
became manipulated into the corrupt exploitation of vulnerable and marginalized
populations who had few options. While viewed by many Northerners at the time as
less than model citizens, intelligence office brokers also ironically filled
the manpower needs (on the battlefront as well as on the home front) that ultimately
helped facilitate Union victory. They provide quite the intriguing paradox.
Not surprisingly intelligence office
brokers seemed to target those most vulnerable. They sought out the unemployed and
immigrants in the North to fill substitute roles for soldiers who could afford
to buy their way out of service. These middlemen also located recently freed African
American men (once they were finally allowed to officially enlist) to fill the
state quotas required by the federal government. Agents combed the refugee
camps to find freedwomen and children, as well as white Unionist refugees, to
work in Northern homes and on Northern farms at low wages. Even the Confederate
soldier was not out of bounds to these brokers. Confederate prisoners and deserters
who pledged the oath of allegiance to the United States could obtain employment
with the federal government through intelligence office agents. For a price,
agents moved workers to where the work was needed, often, of course, with
little regard for the working conditions or ultimate fate of the worker. In
doing so, these middlemen commodified the worker, not so differently than how the
slave trader had the enslaved.
Men
is Cheap did not provide much
discussion about reform efforts, nor the use of fraudulent free labor as a
political tool. Perhaps there were few attempts at reform due to the constant
focus on prosecuting the war, but I would be surprised, if at minimum, the
Democratic Party or “Copperhead” factions did not at least mention instances of
this abuse if effort to gain political ground.
Regardless, Men is Cheap makes a significant contribution to the body of Civil
War scholarship, particularly that relating to the growing genre of labor
history. How the United States came to regard labor developed in part from the
Civil War years, and its relevance is still clearly present in today’s society.
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