Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America by Brian P. Luskey (review)

Men Is Cheap connects Union recruitment and labor practices to a general crisis of free labor ideology during the Civil War. Brian Luskey argues that the real northern economy was about making other people work for you, whereas free labor ideology gave a just-so story about universal upward mobility. Put these together and you get a vast social pyramid scheme. According to Luskey, northerners believed the story against the evidence of their senses, which repeatedly showed them that “competing and succeeding in the wage labor economy meant taking advantage of people when you could” (135).

Luskey begins with the emergence of employment agencies, known as “intelligence offices,” in antebellum cities. He shows that they were widely perceived as shady intermediaries that deceived both employers and employment seekers. Yet he maintains that public condemnation was conveniently disingenuous. The fundamental fraud was the setup of the wage labor economy, which provided ample opportunities for the relatively minor, yet nevertheless representative, frauds of the employment agencies.

Things get interesting when Luskey takes us into the war years. “Even though Americans despised intelligence offices,” he writes, “they nevertheless adopted them as models on which to speed the flow of soldiers and workers throughout the country during the war” (45). Recruiting volunteer regiments, contracting substitutes for draftees, and putting freedpeople to work as camp laborers and, later, as domestics in northern households, all involved the peculiar skills—and moral indifference—of labor brokering. Although the broad outlines of this account will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the war’s northern home front, Luskey adds myriad fascinating details and expertly lays bare the hypocrisy that governed much of the military effort.

The book’s six lengthy chapters progress chronologically for the most part, but the scenes and characters shift back and forth. It can be disorienting, but also evocative of the wartime disarray that constitutes one of the central themes. Luskey illuminates this incoherence with deep research into the doings of fairly obscure people. One is Thomas Webster, a Philadelphia merchant who specialized in the Richmond tobacco trade while professing antislavery commitments. His business disrupted during the war, Webster moved into a new role that combined Republican party politics with employer humanitarianism by spearheading an operation to find work for southern ex-slaves. He allows Luskey to explore the tortured, self-exculpatory logic of a free labor apostle. John Nelson, a social-climbing pugilist from Hartford—if such a figure can be imagined—makes for another effective vehicle. Nelson was a liar and braggart who tumbled from one army post to another and, incredibly, made a (false) name for himself as a uniquely capable commander of black soldiers. His brand of cynical nonsense is instantly recognizable to anyone who has read war literature in the vein of Catch-22 or who has grasped the meaning of “toxic masculinity.” In addition to these characters, Luskey’s cast includes the cunning Persis Walker, albeit via her husband’s letters from the battlefront, and the better-known figures of Benjamin Butler and William Still. These various lives swirl through the war and occasionally cross paths, providing a kind of fractured, interior view of a sprawling social scene.

This is primarily a cultural history. “The economic crisis the war produced,” Luskey writes, “was as much about cultural meaning as material distress” (202). At the heart of things was the desire for “power and prestige” (186), which inevitably involved someone’s subordination. Even the humble yearnings of Persis’s husband, Henry, required a fantasy of dumping her menial chores onto a black domestic servant spirited out of enslavement. Within the cultural sphere, Luskey successfully deepens our understanding of the free labor dilemma first identified by David Montgomery in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) and subsequently made a cornerstone of Civil War– era historiography...