Mark A. Lause. Free Labor

In his magisterial The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E. P. Thompson argued that the term “class,” properly understood, represented not a static social category but a historically situated process of identity formation. In Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class, Mark A. Lause joins the many American labor historians who have applied a Thompsonian framework to the experience of working people in the nineteenth-century United States. By Lause’s account, the Civil War proved the crucible of American working-class formation because it transformed core social relationships and cultural attitudes throughout the nation. The war changed how workers saw themselves and how they viewed their bosses, including—in the case of slaves—those who claimed to own them. It also changed how American workers viewed the government. But did they emerge from the Civil War as a single, mutually recognized class in Thompson’s sense of the term? In his choice of subtitle and in the book’s introduction, Lause suggests that they did. Yet a good deal of the evidence he supplies in the body of the text points toward a different conclusion.

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