Capital in Self

Soldier recruitment, experienced and understood through the prism of consumer capitalism and narratives about fraud, forced northern families to create new circulations of credit and capital that connected army camps and distant homes. Some soldiers sought to build on this source of credit to speculate for more individual and family income. Others’ struggles with accumulating credit and capital led them to speak of their desire for black laborers as a means to increase their personal autonomy as employers and heads of household. Union soldiers could not take advantage of the “chattel principle,” which served as the foundation for human commodification in southern slavery. In the context of their other speculations about credit and wages, soldiers believed that becoming an employer meant earning economic and cultural capital and the independence it conferred. To many Union soldiers, personal autonomy could only be earned—and validated by peers—through the control of workers’ labor. American men arrived at recruiting offices driven by a variety of ideological and material forces. Their decisions to enlist and the government’s efforts to recruit them cannot be understood apart from the culture of capitalism from which northerners hailed and the flows of capital that the war would produce.

A Great Social Problem

The war for Union, Abraham Lincoln reasoned, would be won on its balance sheet as much as in the hearts and minds of its citizens. This was true both from the perspective of the War Department and individual northern households. Union soldiers—volunteers, draftees, and substitutes—poured from the North toward the South to vanquish the slaveholders’ aristocracy. The manpower that went into their killing and dying work produced the movement of thousands of white and black southern refugees to the households of white northerners. Recruiters, brokers, benevolent societies, and northern families—all believers that free labor could emancipate them—would try to seize the power, the capital, embedded in the labor of the men, women, and children fleeing to them. Doing so would help them win the war for Union.

The Draft, Popularized

Benjamin F. Butler’s ideas about how to “popularize” certain types of coercion—the Federal draft—unfolded at the end of 1863 on the Virginia coast as he and his subordinates defined the parameters of wage labor in their military department. That was a process dependent upon the intersecting imperatives of coercion and consent operating within the army. The ways white officers, recruiters, and black soldiers experienced and understood wage labor during the war was through the filter of force, obligation, and free will. Union Army officers and recruiting agents sought access to laborers and tried to harness them to the nation’s—and perhaps their personal—benefit. These men did so in different ways, and they came into conflict with each other because they disagreed about the legitimate balance of consent and coercion in a wage labor economy.

Worthy of His Hire

In the second summer of the war, northern states and localities established committees to raise bounty funds by subscription or loan and petitioned the federal government to add its own resources to sweeten their offers. Otherwise, they would not obtain enough volunteers to meet the quotas assigned by the Lincoln administration. The bounties that enticed Union soldiers to demonstrate their civic virtue were the very things that enticed them to defraud their government. When soldiers did not receive the bounties promised by their contracts, they felt “deceived.” Soldiers who came to distrust the promises of contracts sought other avenues to seize greater autonomy. When President Abraham Lincoln sought to use emancipation to strengthen the Union’s war effort in ways that validated free labor’s commitment to the rights of those with capital, white northerners saw their chance. The demise of slavery gave them opportunities to envision a free labor future in which they would benefit at former slaves’ expense. White northerners envisioned mobilizing these black laborers’ “capital in self” to bolster their own wages and credit their claims to independence through the war for Union.

Black Republican

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.

Introduction

The Civil War tested free labor and exposed its contradictions, for this ideology had insidious consequences that spurred competition for survival as much as success. The war demonstrated that all northerners were dependent on other people’s labor and capital, even though employers’ and employees’ dependence was not equivalent. Civil War northerners used their wages—money they considered capital in the making—and their ability to employ workers as indices that measured their relative independence. In that way, the Union war seemed to northerners an opportunity to become more independent rather than an affront to their faith in free labor. Nevertheless, the war for Union unmade the promise of free labor for workers and upheld the promise of free labor for those with capital. Men Is Cheap tells the stories of basement-dwelling intelligence office keepers, ordinary Union soldiers and famous officers, household mistresses, failed-businessmen-turned-recruiters, politicians, and benevolent society agents who fused their interests and those of their clients to that of the state and used the violent circumstances of war to engage in human trafficking in the name of wage labor and free capital.

Conclusion

Wage labor employers won the war for Union, and they had won it with the assistance of intelligence offices managed by private entrepreneurs and state institutions such as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Union soldiers, northern women, businessmen, army officers, and politicians should get credit for being among abolition’s agents. They believed wholeheartedly in free labor, because the trajectory that ideology mapped for northerners showed that the only way to more independence in a market in which all were dependent was through the accumulation of capital and the opportunity to exploit others’ labor. They fought the war for Union against the slaveholders’ aristocracy to bolster their own authority. The movement of workers created by soldier recruitment, emancipation, and what Abraham Lincoln called the “friction and abrasion” of war gave them opportunities to do so. Intelligence offices served this war for Union by marshaling workers whose “capital in self” the state and employers could access for their benefit. These institutions could also take the blame for the inequalities and disappointments of wage labor capitalism in ways that obscured the fact that the war’s labor movements had unmade the promise of free labor for working people.

Bargains Worse than Fraudulent

Antebellum Americans’ experiences in and debates about intelligence offices reflected and shaped the broader debate about northern and southern political economy occurring in the years prior to the Civil War. As politicians worried—and comic publications laughed—about the consequences of the nation divided, intelligence offices and the intense conversations swirling around them revealed the ways Americans were confronting the fact that their households were divided between kitchen and parlor, upstairs and downstairs. The secession crisis and the beginning of the Civil War exacerbated these concerns, because respectable men of business as well as impoverished workers desperately sought safe and steady positions as sources of credit and capital ran dry. Intelligence office transactions illuminated what wage labor was in well-to-do households, popular culture, and political economy in critically important ways just as northerners and southerners came into conflict about labor—how it was recruited, moved, and exploited—in the Civil War. Even though Americans despised intelligence offices, they nevertheless adopted them as models upon which to speed the flow of soldiers and workers throughout the country during the war. Out of crisis, some northerners imagined opportunity in the movement of people to accrue credit and capital.