It’s no coincidence that the debate in which Lincoln had participated was winding down by the 1890s and had virtually disappeared in American popular discourse a few decades later: wage labor won. It’s now so pervasive that most people today probably don’t ever question or think much about it, in the way fish do not question the water in which they swim. It just *is.*

It’s no coincidence because not long after Lincoln’s speech, two things happened.

First, in 1865, chattel slavery was outlawed (except as punishment for a crime) when the 13th amendment took effect.

Second, in 1890, the US census bureau declared the frontier closed, in the sense that there were so many (white) Americans living in western census tracts that there was no longer a meaningful frontier boundary beyond which the US government could ethnically cleanse for more settlement.

2/10

The end of chattel slavery and transition to wage slavery were intrinsically linked. Without the ability to escape to the (genocidally established) frontier and labor for oneself, workers lost any plausible means of escaping wage labor. Surrounded entirely by resources already owned by someone else, they had no choice but to labor for those owners or be starved by those owners.

Without the means to escape, to opt out and labor for oneself, we become trapped. There’s no need for the costly coercive apparatuses of chattel slavery; the much cheaper apparatus of property will do just fine.

3/10

This sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theorist inference but—there’s a running theme here—people at the time explicitly talked in these terms!

In 1862, some anonymous European bankers drafted what came to be known as the Hazzard Circular, a pamphlet which they sent to their American counterparts. In it, they argued quite explicitly that:

“Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.”

4/10

They just…said it. Out loud, as it were. Explicitly. If you can control people through wages, that’s cheaper than controlling them as slaves, and you still get work out of them. That’s how capitalism works, folks. It is a transformation of slavery, not its replacement.

In her 1965 work “The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, Ester Boserup made a similar observation:

“Where population is sparse and fertile land abundant and uncontrolled, a social hierarchy can be maintained only by direct, personal control over the members of the lower class. In such communities therefore, both subjugated peoples and individual captives of war are kept in personal bondage. Bonded labour is a characteristic feature of communities with a hierarchic structure, but surrounded by so much uncontrolled land suitable for cultivation by long- fallow methods that it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding alternative means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that the land can be controlled, it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower class in personal bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working classes of the right to be independent cultivators.”

5/10

All states are, in effect, gigantic engines for mobilizing people and converting their labor into something elites find useful. Until fairly recently, this invariably meant some form of bondage—chattel slavery, serfdom, debt peonage, forced resettlement, corvée (taxes paid in labor), tribute, etc. That is, people had to be directly forced, often at great expense to the coercer.

This was necessary because, as James Scott observes in “Against the Grain,”

“a peasantry—assuming that it has enough to meet its basic needs—will not automatically produce a surplus that elites might appropriate, but must be compelled to produce it.”

Despite all their coercive powers, states in the past always struggled with what we might call leakage—people shirking their obligations or even fleeing the state entirely. Scott argues quite convincingly that the earliest city walls were likely built to keep workers in, not enemies out.

6/10

History is replete with examples: Roman slaves who rose in revolt; American slaves who escaped to Canada; Spartan helots who joined Athenian forces; Mesopotamian peasants who fled and joined “barbarian” communities; European indentured servants who fled to join Native American communities. When we can, we shirk; when we can’t shirk, we try to leave.

Labor has to be monitored, contained, and compelled, often at onerous cost to the elites extracting that labor. Every feudal lord lived in what was essentially permanent garrison duty. Every antebellum slave owner lived in constant terror of a slave revolt. Poor things!

7/10