Abstract
Labor scholars and activists are familiar with the dramatic impact of the Second World War in reshaping labor relations in the United States (and elsewhere). Now historian Mark Lause reaches deeper into American history to consider the impact of another seminal American conflict on worker identity and labor relations. Free Labour argues the Civil War was in many ways an enormous labor movement. From the mass strike of black slaves who refused to accept their condition to the impact of war mobilization on America’s burgeoning and diverse worker movements, Lause demonstrates the Civil War was more than a battle to maintain the Union and abolish slavery, and more than a struggle waged by generals and politicians. Comprising both Union and Confederate armies were American workers. As the two sides mobilized, union locals took sides; some trade federations found their locals split along Union–Confederate battle lines. As the war progressed, workers on both sides continued to organize and strike, with political and military leaderships responding in a variety of ways. Martial law and violent repression constituted one response, at other times, the exigencies of war meant there was no option but to meet workers’ demands.
One overarching theme Lause shows emerged during the war was a heightened recognition of government’s role in workers’ lives. Just as employers looked to government and military to put down labor unrest and make sure war industries continued to operate, so, too, did workers realize appeals to government—in particular the federal government—offered a renewed strategy, outflanking local political and business leadership. Just as the American government had taken on a new role in cohering a diverse and patchwork nation by moving against the rebel Confederate states, so, too, did unions began to think in increasingly national terms. This trend would grow in the post-Civil War period, with the emergence of national labor federations.
Relations between African-Americans—former black slaves—and the rest of the labor movement remained fraught both during and after the war. While some idealistic unionists had advocated taking their locals to war in the abolitionist cause, fear on the part of white-dominated unions, including those comprised of recent European immigrants, that newly emancipated black labor would threaten their jobs led some unions to ostracize black workers. Significantly, Lause also identifies the emergence of a new politics of “respectability,” which he aligns with a politics of whiteness. Unionist victory in the Civil War and abolition of slavery served to reinforce an increasingly prevalent American progress narrative. Yet this narrative depicted mass mobilization—historically, a tool of black slaves, reflected most powerfully in their mass self-emancipation struggle from slavery—as a primitive and implicitly racialized form of organizing and activism. Militancy began to take on a racialized character, which was exploited by those who benefited from capitalist exploitation. The institutions of the newly reconstructing nation reinforced this narrative—schools, media, government—and in the post–Civil War era, increasingly denigrated mass actions against employers, which were seen as “not quite ‘respectable’ and ‘white’” (p. 179). The impact lingers to the present day, observes Lause, with talk of union thugs and denigration of militancy and wildcat strikes.
This template was firmly and ironically entrenched during the great railroad strike of 1877, notes Lause, when former Union General Andrew Jackson Smith and former Confederate General John S. Marmaduke—archfoes thirteen years earlier—brought their united forces to bear on behalf of the capitalist ruling class against striking workers in St. Louis.
Lause recognizes his history could easily become yet another simplistic narrative of white male unionists. He devotes a chapter to women’s struggle, yet it is difficult to do justice to so complex a topic in such a short space. Likewise, Lause repeatedly emphasizes the importance of not losing sight of the self-emancipation struggles of black workers, yet this forms the much smaller part of his otherwise fascinating and insightful book.