- Guest Editor's OverviewHave Civil War Historians Lost Labor History?
As Civil War historians, we talk and write endlessly about workers. How could we not? After all, the era's enslaved people toiled to generate profit; its women performed the labor of social reproduction; and the multitudes who constituted its armies self-identified as mechanics or laborers.1 "Free labor" was the Republican Party rallying cry and its expansion the motivation for secession. The respective war efforts, Union and Confederate, depended on mobilizing and marshaling millions of wage earners, care workers, and working-class military enlistees. The most common defining trait of the conflict's soldiers was not race, region, religion, national origin, or even language, but their shared status as laborers. While soldiering proved its own form of drudgery, wartime home fronts were marked by worker activity. In the North, thousands of employees, from the Illinois coal fields to the workshops of Boston, protested or walked off the job, and "general strikes" of enslaved people in the South instigated the process of full-blown emancipation—the most significant labor event in US history. Even after slave jubilee and political restoration, class conflict—the insistence among organized labor that social reconstruction be extended northward, and broader [End Page 7] disagreements over the meaning of free labor, with regard to both material redistribution and social inclusion—became the rock on which the Radical Republican coalition fractured.2 Indeed, the one issue on which virtually all participants and contemporary observers agreed—from Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee to Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx—was that the war era was, on some fundamental level, rooted in divergent systems and understandings of labor, mediated of course by class experiences.3
Yet, despite the ubiquity of workers in narratives of the period, Civil War historians seem to have lost sight of labor as a category in its own right. This problem, part and parcel of a broader retreat from class as a mode of analysis, was evident at the most recent meeting of the Society of Civil War Historians, in Philadelphia in June 2022, where one third of the explanatory "holy trinity" of race, class, and gender was glaringly neglected. While the conference program contained four panels emphasizing gender and nine spotlighting race, none foregrounded or used the term class. In fact, of the sixty-eight papers presented that weekend, which does not include various roundtable and workshop talks, thirty-four referred to race or gender in their titles. Only one directly included class, and it concerned the so-called middle class, a term that would not be popularized in US political discourse for another seventy-five years. A mere two papers referenced class's practical expression and constituent term, labor.4 [End Page 8]
Civil War history's labor blind spot has been decades in the making.5 Its origins reside in society-wide trends—including declining union density and the rise of the neoliberal order, and the ideological assumptions that such trends impart on academia, including the decline of historical materialism as an analytical framework—and lay beyond individual historians and their professional institutions.6 Civil War scholars, like other fields affected by the New Social History, have spent decades justifiably seeking to reverse historic biases in the literature, and in academia itself—namely the relative paucity of Black people and women as both authors and subjects. However, having made considerable and necessary strides against these structural imbalances, Civil War scholarship, characterized by the cultural turn, is now in danger of overcorrecting by presenting "relations" of race, gender, and region in ways that subordinate class and labor—and therefore risks obscuring more than it clarifies.7 Put simply, using race, gender, or identity as a primary analytic without thoroughly investigating its central relation to political economy and social class is to present a skewed understanding of historical cause and effect and, more troubling, of power itself.
It is not as though Civil War historians have jettisoned themes of workers and political economy altogether—not by any means. Slavery studies are labor history, of course, and some of the most vibrant recent scholarship and spirited debates in the...