Leseprobe
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Men Is Cheap
Brian P. Luskey
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The University of North Carolina Press 
Sachbuch / 20. Jahrhundert (bis 1945)
Beschreibung
When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices," institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it.
Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.
Kundenbewertungen
United States Colored Troops, free labor ideology, Pennsylvania Abolition Society, Underground Railroad, substitute and bounty brokers, Panic of 1857, domestic servitude, secession crisis, Department of Virginia and North Carolina, southern refugees and Confederate deserters in the North, conscription in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin F. Butler, consumer culture and advertising, John Andrew, intelligence offices, soldier recruitment in the Union Army, Henry Louis Stephens, Department of the Gulf, Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, Irish immigrants, slave emancipation, Union officers and African American camp servants, William Still, Freedmen’s Bureau, Republican Party, wage labor in the Civil War, slave trade