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

@HeavenlyPossum
Good series thank you.

Note: From what I've read from people who've tried to research it, the first published references to the so called "Hazzard Circular" date from c 1894, and no earlier nor original copies are known, so there is speculation that the text may not actually date to 1862.

Either way, that still supports your point that people were publicly talking about the issues in those terms back in the 19th century.