| Book Review | Law and History Review, 25.2

Book Review

Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 277. $65 (ISBN 0-521-63526-8).

Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. 263. $55 cloth (ISBN 0-691-05957-8); $22.95 paper (ISBN 0-8203-2860-X).

Karin L. Zipf, Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715–1919, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. 207. $42.95 (ISBN 0-8071-3045-1).

For most of the twentieth century, historians shied away from legal materials as sources of general historical knowledge. This was not always so. Medieval and early modern historians heavily relied on legal documents for their chronicles. In the nineteenth century, such leading scholars as Savigny and Sir Henry Maine thought legal studies were the best route to understanding a culture's distinctive volksgeist. But in the twentieth century, perhaps because of an increase in the availability of other material, as well as a diversification in historiographical methods and interests, historians tended to leave legal material to specialists in the history of law.

Recently, however, historians have returned to law and legal documents as sources of insight into cultural history. The three books reviewed here are part of this welcome trend. They draw from law, but are contributions to Southern, African-American, labor, family, gender, and cultural studies.

In addition, the three books are disturbing studies into how practices that modern societies regard as evil—practices such as slavery, female coverture, and forced child labor—could have flourished in the recent past even as they came under trenchant criticism.

Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage to Contract is an extraordinarily nuanced study of the "paradoxes" (ix) of contract as the organizing principle of Gilded Age economic and social relations. As late as Jacksonian America, independent property owners were the idealized citizens. "By the end of Reconstruction," Stanley tells us, "the free wage system was ascendant throughout the country" (62). With this development, the "vast majority" of the population "had been transformed into a class of hirelings"(62). Contract replaced freeholding as the nation's dominant political, social, and economic organizing principle.

Stanley's contribution is to thoroughly trace out the strengths, uses, complexities, and contradictions of contract as the Gilded Age's central organizing metaphor. In chapters that move sequentially through discussions of former slaves in the post-bellum South, factory workers in the North, and married women, beggars, and prostitutes on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Stanley deepens our understanding of the ideology and reality of "free contract" in the era in which society "supposedly" completed its transformation "from Status to Contract" as its legitimating principle (2). Stanley's book demonstrates the "ambiguities and contradictions" (2) of the final stages of this movement.

Stanley opens her book with a chapter explicating contract's strength as a world view in a post-Civil War country that "idealized ownership of self and voluntary exchange between individuals who were formally equal and free" (x). "In the age of slave emancipation contract became a dominant metaphor for social relations and the very symbol of freedom," she writes (x). Having established contract's role as a constitutive norm, Stanley's following chapters study the diverse meanings of contractual freedom for former slaves, factory workers, married women, beggars, and prostitutes to demonstrate the cross-cutting uses, strengths, ambiguities, and problems of free contract as a cultural organizing and legitimizing principle.

Stanley shows that contract was a problematic foundation principle for three related reasons. First, in Gilded Age America, contract still competed with the older idea of America as a land of "independent property owners" (62). Second, it was certainly disputable whether the premises that made contract a metaphor for freedom—the ability of individuals to contract through free volition—existed in an era of grinding poverty and increasing disparities of wealth. Third, despite its dominance, contract was not meant to be a universal organizing principle. Stanley deftly shows that despite the centrality of contract thinking, American culture still had significant domains that continued to be organized around status (marriage was one of them) or thought wholly beyond the reach of free contract (prostitution, for example).

In her studies of former slaves, factory workers, women, beggars, and prostitutes, Stanley elaborates the reality, problems, and implications of contract as the normative cornerstone of Gilded Age America with clarity and subtlety. In Stanley's hands, "[s]lavery's downfall amid industrial capitalism's ascendance" (268) reveals "the paradox" (268) that although slavery was premised on the sale of human beings, freedom is "imagined" (268) as involving the sale of part of a human being—his or her time and labor. It also reveals the "enduring principles—that some things must never be for sale" and "that the legitimacy of the market rests on its moral boundaries" (268).

Ariela Gross's Double Character draws upon legal material to explore the antebellum Southern culture of white masculine honor and its intersection with African slavery. Focused on civil trials, Double Character reconstructs the way various groups—masters and slaves, plaintiffs and defendants, witnesses and jurors, and judges and commentators—employed the norms of the culture of honor and slavery in courtroom controversy. Double Character also deconstructs the courtroom manifestation of that culture to show how it confronted, denied, or cabined intruding realities that could not be admitted as constituent parts of the system.

Gross's study employs multiple methodologies. In drawing from appellate cases across the South, trial records from Adams County, Mississippi, and census and tax records concerning the participants in those trials, Gross created three databases that she probes as a statistician while she reads and writes about the same records as a humanist scholar. Double Character is a metaphor for Gross's methodology as well as the subjects she explores.

As a social historian well versed in the vast secondary literature on antebellum Southern law and culture, Gross combs her data to reconstruct "the relationship between ... local trials and local culture" and the "paradoxes that arose from slaves' double identity as human subjects and the objects of property relations" (5). Double Character is a study of the way that trials over slaves as objects of property both reveal and deny the fact of the slaves' "moral agency" (4) and of the way that antebellum notions "of honor and dishonor played out both in the marketplace and in the courtroom" (47). Gross's study gives life to a society governed by contradictory norms through a focused study of "the legal arena" where, Gross says, "white men were forced to confront the contradictions" and where "it would take work to rationalize [them] away" (73).

The benefit of Gross's approach is that her intensive scrutiny of Adams County trials recover the subtleties of Southern life that tend to be filtered out of more general studies. It also allows her to show how the world view these realities reflected were used for diverse ends in the give-and-take of courtroom controversy. Gross's approach convincingly recreates a supple and tightly interlocking belief system. Gross's treatment of the microcosm of Adams County civil trials sheds much light on the macrocosm of antebellum Southern law, commerce, and culture.

Consider the linked problems of slaves as moral agents, as runaways, and as subjects of suits for breach of contract. "Recognizing slave agency threatened the property regime," Gross writes, "because it violated the tenets of racial ideology that undergirded Southern plantation slavery" (89). Yet slave agency was a fact, readily apparent in the stories told at trial about slaves that ran way from their masters. Confronted with this reality, Gross shows how white Southerners constructed "explanations of slave character and behavior ... as functions of slave management, as immutable vice, [and] as habit or disease" (89). All these explanations, Gross points out, operated to deny the slaves free will and intelligence.

This is but one illustration of a rich trove of episodes and insights that Gross culls from her research into archival legal records. Taken as a whole, she provides a window through which we can observe antebellum courtroom argument conducted in the grip of a world view that, within its terms, provided satisfactory explanations for all phenomena, at least to its dominant white culture.

Karin Zipf's Labor of Innocents recounts the two hundred years that North Carolina courts had the power to remove children from "unfit" parents and commit them to long-term apprenticeships in domestic, field, or factory service. As Zipf shows, over time the notion of what qualities made parents "unfit" varied, reflecting changes in the social and political goals of the North Carolina white elite. At different times, poverty, having African-American parents, or a household headed by a "single or widowed" woman were the primary characteristics of "unfit" as "North Carolina used apprenticeship to undermine the authority of certain parents over their children" and safeguard "the view of the ideal head of household" as a "white male patriarch" (2). Zipf's study brings out the class, gender, and racial basis of North Carolina family law throughout the two centuries in which forced child apprenticeship was a frequent means of (as well as a justification for) state intervention "in the affairs of families whose status it considered objectionable" (2).

From a close scrutiny of court cases, county records, and apprenticeship indentures, Zipf divides her study into four periods that track shifting "dynamics in race, gender, and class relations" (2). Zipf notes, for example, that in the 1850s, as the South moved toward secession, there was an upsurge in the involuntary apprenticeship of the children of free African Americans as part of the state's "intensified ... efforts to limit the rights of African American parents" (2). Although these efforts ended during Reconstruction, they were replaced by "gender based regulations requiring courts to apprentice all children of single women (both black and white) and certain widowed women" (3). It was not until 1919 that North Carolina scrapped its forced child apprenticeship system because "it failed to address children's rights, an increasingly popular concept among social reformers that had important consequences for gender relations" (3).

Zipf teaches that apprenticeship was not "a nostalgic institution that trained children for a craft" (7). It was a tool "to control indigent populations, secure an alternate source of cheap labor, and enforce a patriarchal, and later, white supremacist social order" (2).

Zipf is aware that involuntary child apprenticeship was never North Carolina's primary labor system. "It was easily overshadowed by slavery in the antebellum period and by sharecropping in the postbellum era," she writes (5). Forced child apprenticeship's economic insignificance, however, allows Zipf to situate it as "a metaphor for power relations" (5). Although economic considerations do intrude, especially during the labor shortages brought on by the Civil War, forced child apprenticeship's general economic unimportance allows Zipf more fully to cast it as a reflection of society's dominant gender, race, and class norms.

Insignificance on the macroeconomic level did not entail unimportance at the microeconomic level. In the preindustrial and industrializing eras, child labor in the home and on the farm was a crucial part of the family economy. Forced child apprenticeship had a devastating impact on families that already were economically hard pressed. As part of her story, Zipf recounts how "without the protection of their parental rights, women and African American men suffered the loss of their children's labor and consequently lacked the opportunities of independence enjoyed by white men" (7). Forced apprenticeship thus reenforced as it reflected the dependent status of African Americans and single women. Beliefs about the inability of African Americans and single women to properly provide for and train their children underlay forced child apprenticeship, which contemporaries conceived as a beneficent system.

Drawn from close studies of legal institutions, doctrines, and documents, From Bondage to Contract, Double Character, and Labor of Innocents are revealing studies of American class, gender, and race relations. They warrant attention from specialists in labor, family, gender, economic, African American, Southern, and Gilded Age history. Legal material is not just for legal historians any longer.

Stephen A. Siegel

DePaul University College of Law

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