Book Review

In this rich new book, Amy Dru Stanley explores the origins and meanings of contract in late-nineteenth-century North America. If the ending of slavery had made it illegal to buy or sell people, it also paradoxically "consecrat[ed] the market as a model of social relations among free persons." For North Americans in those years, Stanley argues, "the problem was distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not."

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Proceeding thematically rather than chronologically, Stanley shows how southern freedpeople, advocates for women's rights, northern "labor spokesmen," and even social science researchers struggled over the meanings of wage work and marriage. In an era when a contract was widely assumed to make the difference between freedom and bondage, Stanley argues that "the debate over slavery and emancipation" helped make contract principles part of Americans' "everyday life and speech." Even those who criticized the growing commodification of American society—who railed against treating work or sex as commodities—often couched their critiques in the language of contract. In trying to "defin[e] the rights contrary to bondage," the debate over slavery and emancipation ended up "exposing the ambiguities and contradictions" that arose when marriage, wage work, and other parts of life were so often defined in contractual terms.

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