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  • Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause
  • Andre M. Fleche
Mark A. Lause, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2015)

Mark Lause begins his study of the mid-19th-century American labour movement by identifying a serious gap in the historiographical literature. Lause [End Page 299] observes that most historians of the Civil War have ignored labour history in developing accounts of the era, while, at the same time, few labour historians have sought to delve into the history of the war years. As a result, scholars have been left with an incomplete picture of the era’s importance in American history. Lause’s study attempts to fill that gap by placing labour at the center of the Civil War experience. He concludes that the war shaped the labour movement in fundamental ways. “The Civil War,” he argues, “proved central to the making of an American working class.” (ix)

Lause argues that workers responded to the war by organizing aggressively. The growing trade union movement took advantage of wartime production demands by lobbying for better wages, hours, and working conditions. To be sure, the war years also strained the movement at times. Secession and the slavery question divided some trades. Thousands of workers joined the US Army, and heavy combat deaths decimated rank-and-file trade-union leadership. Editors and employers criticized strikes and protests in time of war as unpatriotic and “socialistic.” Indeed, Lause points out, even some secessionists “warned of imminent plebian revolution across the North.” (117)

Still, workers persisted in the face of challenges. “From the fall of 1863 through the following winter,” Lause writes, “unprecedented numbers of workers across the Union realized that their wages would never catch up with the rising wartime cost of living without some action on their part. So they organized, even in those trades and industries that developed so rapidly because of the war.” (104) Northern workers especially benefitted from the perceived ideological congruence between the cause of the Union and the cause of the trade unions. Before and during the war, Lause argues, trade unionists embraced the Republican Party’s free labour ideology. The fight against slavery and for free soil in the West allowed workers to push politicians to also critique the “wages slavery” they felt had befallen many white workers. Though politicians, especially in the Republican Party, were not always sympathetic to workers’ demands, Lause argues that the fight for emancipation, human dignity, and upward mobility for free labourers helped to legitimize labour’s right to advocate and organize. “The experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Lause writes, “shaped the idea of an acceptably respectable and responsible labor organization, which became the cornerstone of modern American trade unionism.” (157–158).

The most novel aspect of Lause’s work is that he takes a comprehensive view of the 19th-century labour movement, including slaves, women, and Southern white workers in his consideration of working-class politics. He argues that slaves, like white workers, took advantage of the war in order to organize, joining W.E.B. DuBois in describing a great wartime general strike. “Several million slaves, with various degrees of militancy, walked off their jobs,” Lause writes. (56) Women, meanwhile, struggled to challenge gendered definitions of the working class. During the war, women workers faced increased exploitation but, like their male counterparts, took steps to organize. Still, they tended to appeal to patriarchal values, which stressed the protection of women, making it difficult to win true solidarity as workers.

Immigrants also faced mixed results. Lause explains that during the mid-19th century, an aggressive ethnic trade unionism developed, especially in Northern cities. Indeed, conservative editorialists began blaming most strikes on immigrants and foreign-born ethnics. During the war, Lause argues, “ethnically ‘dangerous classes’” became [End Page 300] a “substitute for the working class.” (76) Lause contends that many contemporary historians have made similar mistakes in their treatment of the New York City draft riots, which have typically been attributed to the explosion of resentments harboured by foreign-born workers. He argues...

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