Grand Army of Labor

Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War

Matthew E. Stanley

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780252085734, 9780252043741
• eBook ISBN: 9780252052644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Enlisting memory in a new fight for freedom

From the Gilded Age through the Progressive era, labor movements reinterpreted Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of working people while workers equated activism with their own service fighting for freedom during the war. Matthew E. Stanley explores the wide-ranging meanings and diverse imagery used by Civil War veterans within the sprawling radical politics of the time. As he shows, a rich world of rituals, songs, speeches, and newspapers emerged among the many strains of working class cultural politics within the labor movement. Yet tensions arose even among allies. Some people rooted Civil War commemoration in nationalism and reform, and in time, these conservative currents marginalized radical workers who tied their remembering to revolution, internationalism, and socialism.

An original consideration of meaning and memory, Grand Army of Labor reveals the complex ways workers drew on themes of emancipation and equality in the long battle for workers' rights.

CHAPTER 1

King Labor

Workers Imagine Emancipation beyond Equality

SAMUEL FENTON CARY took the stage at New York City’s Cooper Union on July 3, 1868, in defense of workingmen. A famed antislavery reformer and a lifelong resident of Cincinnati, Cary supposed the emancipation of over 4 million enslaved people would be a sea change in the historical destinies of the world’s laboring classes. As many workers saw it, the “universal emancipation of labor” was the next logical step following chattel slavery’s destruction. But Cary also feared that the war had facilitated undue capital aggregation, enchaining common people through class domination. Beginning his lecture by asking rhetorically, “Who are the workingmen?,” his answer was steeped in labor republicanism. Real workers, those who “produce all the wealth of the nation,” were the men who had “fought the battles of the late war, saved the Republic from destruction, made all the sacrifices, and are now toiling in the field and workshop to pay for the debt incurred by the war.” The “producers” of Union victory were not, according to Cary, the contractors, bondholders, speculators, and financiers who sat out the fight, “making money out of their country’s misfortunes.” He renounced those “owners of labor” as tantamount to the “slaveocracy.”

Cary was adamant that the solutions to postwar inequalities resided in the so-called liberation of labor. Echoing the Chicago Labor Congress’s declaration of 1867, he insisted that such deliverance include trade union organization, progressive taxation, a national currency, and land reform. This final point did not entail “an equal distribution of property,” he reiterated. Rather, Cary lobbied for decommodification in which public lands withdrawn from the market be granted to both native and foreign-born settlers. In staking his claims, Cary appealed directly to the memory of the Union soldier. Workingmen were the ultimate patriots, he reminded his audience, for it was disproportionately laborers who had been “ready to offer their lives to preserve the integrity of the Union.” It was they who had sacrificed the comforts of home and hearth and whose blood still stained the Southern soil. It was they who had marched, been imprisoned, fought, struggled, bled, and died, leaving widows and orphans behind. “The capitalists made no sacrifices during the war,” Cary stated bluntly. Northern owners and financial elites were shirkers turned masters, simultaneously cowards and oppressive masters.¹

A wartime Republican, Cary would go on to join the Greenback-Labor movement, becoming the party’s vice presidential nominee in 1876. But in 1868, with a disempowered wage-earning class in the industrial North and landless freedpeople exploited under contract work in the transitioning South, land and labor were the fundamental questions. For former slaves, emancipation and military service buttressed demands for economic and political rights. Trade unionists co-opted emancipationist memory, too. For workingmen white and Black, the sectional conflict offered a lodestone of political meaning, and its collective memory became a site of consciousness-building and a rallying point for labor’s cause. From the Old South’s “Slave Power” to the “rebel aristocracy” of the war years, laborers—both wage earners and small farmers—employed antislavery vernacular to attack slaveholders as class enemies. Nurtured during the antebellum era and honed during the War of the Rebellion, this association of the Confederacy with oligarchy—of consolidated economic power with a sort of civic “treason” against American ideals—proved transferable to labor’s postwar battles.

The popular memory of the antislavery movement and of the calamitous war that had just occurred was central to Reconstruction era debates over political economy. Just as the Civil War had been part of a grand labor struggle—W. E. B. Du Bois’s “general strike”—agitators framed postwar debates over land and labor as part of an antislavery tradition. Workers built on the praxis of antebellum activists who sought to expand the meaning of freedom—abolitionists, trade unionists, suffragists, land reformers, utopians, socialists, and cooperationists—as well as on those of rights-demanding freedpeople. In doing so they articulated a cultural template of liberation in which the ruination of chattel slavery was but a harbinger. Invoking emancipation and military service to claim economic rights, Black veterans and freedpeople of the “Great Tradition”—the abolitionist-integrationist belief in full equality—became the first and most vocal laboring people to employ war memories to appeal for large-scale material redistribution. Defining liberation on their own terms, former slaves anticipated the postwar period as one of revolutionary possibility, including the reorganization or decommodification of land property. Although adherents exhibited competing strategies (rebellion, civil disobedience, mass migration), agrarian reform emerged as a clear demand. Yet property confiscation pitted radicalism against liberalism. This challenge to the notion that civic equality and a capitalist marketplace would lead to deserved outcomes spoke to contested interpretations of deeply American ideals: democracy, justice, and liberty.

Although many viewed Black liberation as separate from, or even a hindrance to, the fuller “emancipation of [white] labor,” countless white workers also saw the destruction of slavery—what Karl Marx termed the “movement of slaves” into the greatest slave rebellion in world history—as a blueprint for their own emancipation.² Influenced by local circumstances and distinct political cultures, workers increasingly appropriated the legacy of African American bondage and liberation in order to confront “wage slavery” and communicated designs for “labor emancipation” in which the liquidation of plantation slavery was but one step. This process was evident in the cultural politics of the National Labor Union and through agrarian radicalism in Virginia, where the Readjuster Party used the antislavery vernacular to propel its interracial movement, foretelling both the achievements and dilemmas of later populist struggles. From the vantage of radicalizing wage earners, emancipation was a labor movement, and the labor movement emancipatory. As Mark A. Lause contends, the Civil War created modern American labor organization in part through such competing definitions of “free labor,” as workers rejected the notion of “freedom” as the mere absence of legal enslavement.³ At their most transformational, these liberation scripts challenged property rights beyond property in man.

The Rebel Aristocracy

The ways in which working people remembered the Civil War sprang from the language of antebellum reform. In the North, laborers only gradually conceived of slavery’s destruction as portending universal emancipation. The initial weakness of labor abolitionism spoke to racial consciousness among white workers, the class inclinations of white abolitionists, and the hegemonic capacity of proslavery elites. Throughout the Jacksonian era, outsized numbers of workingmen viewed slavery’s opponents as direct threats to both their livelihoods and their understandings of the United States as a white republic. As Alexander Saxton argues, questions of slavery and race often pitted “white egalitarians,” who frequently exhibited harsh white supremacy, against “white elitists,” who sometimes demonstrated more liberal racial sensibilities.⁴ Incited by prevailing social institutions, notably the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church, Irish American laborers in particular viewed antislavery politics as tantamount to nativism and elitism. Along slavery’s border, white workers overwhelmingly accepted the messaging of powerful reactionaries who insisted that the destruction of slavery would lead to material scarcity, labor competition, lack of employment, wage reduction, or “race war.”⁵ This was so especially in the Lower Middle West, where heightened economic and racial anxieties owing to proximity to the slaveholding South combined to reinforce racial exclusion. Within this economic model of race production, the depth, pervasiveness, and derivatives of anti-Black racism were singular.⁶ Other workers recognized the class limitations of the abolitionist movement, associating its upper-middle-class leadership with the exploitation of labor. Abolitionism’s moralizing strategy also often undermined its capacity to connect antislavery with the self-interests of white wage earners.⁷ Hermann Schlüter asserts that the demands of the labor movement and the elimination of “wage slavery” principally were “met with far less understanding among the Abolitionists than the question of the abolition of chattel slavery among workingmen.”⁸ This abolitionist “blind spot” toward labor impelled countless white workers, known popularly as “the Niggers of the North,” to view the slave’s cause as separate from their own subjugation.⁹ The class and cultural distance between abolitionists and laborers created an expectational gap in which the latter presumed “free labor” to be not merely the absence of bondage but also the steady mobility of workingmen and the elevation of labor’s interests above those of capital. In the words of one labor reformer, although “labor for wages” was a great improvement on systems of slavery and feudalism, it was nevertheless an “imperfect and defective system,” certain to be superseded by an economic order that rewarded labor without subjecting it to “autocratic” control.¹⁰

The early antagonism between labor and abolition hindered both. While trade unionists and land, labor, and currency reformers responded to incipient industrial conditions with emancipationist language, naturally prioritizing their immediate material needs, abolitionists frequently dismissed both “white slavery” and “wage slavery” as the fiction of labor spokesmen or the spin of proslavery propagandists. Those abolitionists who did consider the condition of wage earners insisted that the emancipation of Black slaves precede the fight for wages and hours, to the dismay of many Northern workers.¹¹ But even from the white working-class perspective, there was an increasingly self-evident logic in placing antislavery at the top of the reform agenda. Although comparisons—albeit often hyperbolized ones—between Black slavery and wage labor accentuated the injustice and hyper-exploitation of emerging factory work, the very existence of Black slavery also limited the extent of any critique of the wage system.¹² As David R. Roediger posits, “As long as slavery thrived, any attempt to come to grips with wage labor tended to lapse into exaggerated metaphors or frantic denials of those metaphors.”¹³ This trend of chattel slavery simultaneously inspiring and limiting the power of the trade union movement presaged the complicated relationship between the Northern proletariat and Black agricultural workers in the South during the postwar period.

Even so, worker “emancipation” remained a bipartisan reference in the Second Party System, as various political and ideological camps feared the idea of “owned workers,” and white ones specifically. The Whig Party held that laboring men were best served through its program of internal improvements and state intervention in the economy; Democrats countered that their opposition to tariffs would produce “the emancipation of labor from the bonds of capital.”¹⁴ The emerging free-labor ethos would link an individual brand of democracy with communalism, postulating the West as a reserve for free men and free homesteads—republican alternatives to the undemocratic and unmanly threat of fixed wage earning. Yet this notion of white male workers “on the make” and an impermanent laboring class remained chimerical, and its adherents identified slavery, rather than capitalism, as the greatest threat to the opportunities of non-owners.¹⁵ Moreover, the language of labor enslavement and liberation was not relegated to one section. Exploiting ethnic and economic strains, gender anxiety, and the allure of whiteness among their constituents, Democratic leaders, the party press, and fearmongering planters claimed that the freedom of white workingmen rested on Black enslavement. They alleged that any disruption of the South’s racial-labor hierarchy would “degrade” white labor by slicing wages and employment. Slavery’s opponents, meanwhile, emphasized the ideals of mobility and merit in a free-labor system or affirmed that true emancipation for (presumably white) workingmen was possible only in the absence of Black slavery. Addressing white workers who supported formal racial restriction, some white abolitionists argued that emancipation would produce a sort of informal racial segregation to the benefit of the white race. In an avowal that was sometimes personal and sometimes political, they professed that wages, family ties, and the “suitability” of the climate and working conditions would induce former slaves to stay put (and even prompt Northern Blacks to return south). Such abolitionists swore that the destruction of slavery was in fact the best means of keeping Black people restricted to the South and away from Northern white workers.¹⁶

Others saw more clearly the interrelation between the dissolution of chattel bondage and wage work. Anticipating Marx’s dictum that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin,” Ohio’s Anti-slavery Bugle contended that emancipation was an essential precursor to free labor: “Free labor can never be organized … by the side of slave labor.”¹⁷ Similarly, New York Tribune editor and Fourierist convert Horace Greeley, whose reform socialism advanced free-labor principles, questioned market outcomes and called for a full “emancipation of labor” through the obliteration of “wage slavery.”¹⁸ William H. Seward maintained this point while canvassing Ohio’s Western Reserve during the fall of 1848, asserting that there were two antagonistic forces in American society: freedom and slavery. More than a repudiation of bondage, “freedom,” Seward clarified, “insists on the emancipation and elevation of labor. … Freedom seeks complete and universal emancipation.”¹⁹ Indeed, free-soil ideology helped reconcile labor-abolitionist tension, and it slowly became evident to most Northern workingmen that, rather than serving as a distraction from the interests of workers, the struggle against the slave system was essential to general worker advanc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Second Great Emancipator
• Chapter 1. King Labor: Workers Imagine Emancipation beyond Equality
• Chapter 2. Southern Palm, Northern Pine: Greenbackers and the Reconciliation of Class
• Chapter 3. Against Masters and Money Power: The Knights of Labor and Wage Slavery
• Chapter 4. The Red Flag of Emancipation: Socialism and Revolutionary Memory
• Chapter 5. The Blue-Gray Campaign: Populism and White Reunion
• Chapter 6. Citadel of Labor: The American Federation of Labor and Reformist Memory
• Chapter 7. The Blue and the Gray and the Red: The Rise and Repression of Proletarian Memory
• Epilogue: Resurrecting John Brown’s Body
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover