The Contraction of Freedom

Amy Dru Stanley. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xvi + 277 pp. Footnotes and index. $59.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

In 1866, a black corporal in the U.S. Colored Troops declared to his regiment: "The Marriage Covenant is at the foundation of all our rights. In slavery we could not have legalised marriage: now we have it . . . and we shall be established as a people." ¹ The newly free soldier identified the meaning of freedom in the ability to form a contract--not just any contract, but the contract of marriage. In his speech, he gave marriage a broad, liberatory definition, as a nation-building institution and a fundamental right of free people. To the corporal, this right was both individual and collective. His speech hinted at the broad possibilities inherent in the metaphor of contract, challenging the liberal, abolitionist version of freedom put forward by officials of the Freedman's Bureau and other whites confronting the problems of the postbellum South. The Freedman's Bureau superintendent who heard this speech probably hoped that he and other freedpeople accepted white definitions of the marriage contract as a set of duties and responsibilities; like other officials, he hoped to persuade and, increasingly, to coerce freed slaves into both wage and marriage contracts. Yet to the freedpeople, legal marriage symbolized both family security and freedom as a people. After slavery, the marriage contract, no less than the wage contract, was central to struggles over the meaning of freedom in the United States, for white as well as black citizens.

Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage To Contract begins with the battle against black slavery in the South, and the problem of the meaning of freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. She argues that many, if not most, of the major social and political issues of the nineteenth century can be understood through the lens of contract, in the terms set by the U.S. Army corporal in 1866. Using a variety of sources of intellectual history, Stanley pulls together the themes of marriage, labor, social, and political reform into one tightly-argued narrative. While this overarching story requires occasional distortions, particularly when describing the South, it brings into focus aspects of American history that recede into the background in many studies of the nineteenth century. Over the last two decades, legal historians have significantly reconfigured understandings of slavery, labor, marriage, and family law, highlighting in various ways the power of the ideal of contract freedom, but their revisions have not all entered the mainstream of historical discourse. From Bondage to Contract is the first broad synthetic work of intellectual history of the nineteenth-century United States to put both law and gender at the forefront of political and economic analysis. It is part of a major redefinition of politics that challenges traditional notions of the public/private distinction by showing the centrality of marriage and household to political debates. As such, it is an important contribution to the conversation about nineteenth-century history, and it will no doubt be a much-assigned classroom text for its clear argumentation and broad sweep.

From Bondage to Contract also displays the limitations of its breadth. The work draws heavily on published sources, especially Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, and quotations of primary sources from others' research. At times, the author glosses over contradictory evidence or takes examples out of context in her efforts to reach a unifying thesis. Stanley simplifies many regional complexities in her contrasts between a liberal, capitalist North and a pre-capitalist slave South. The study is also vague on chronology: most of the chapters focus on a single decade, occasionally jumping back and forth in time, and it is hard to grasp a sense of the enormous changes wrought between 1866 and 1896.

Stanley's thesis is that two ideological movements with antebellum roots--abolitionism...