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