Men Is Cheap
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€28.50
A01=Brian P. Luskey
Abraham Lincoln
Author_Brian P. Luskey
Benjamin F. Butler
Category=KCF
Category=KNX
Category=KNXN
Category=KNXU
Category=NHK
conscription in the Civil War
consumer culture and advertising
Department of the Gulf
Department of Virginia and North Carolina
domestic servitude
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
free labor ideology
Freedmen's Bureau
Freedmen’s Bureau
Henry Louis Stephens
intelligence offices
Irish immigrants
John Andrew
Panic of 1857
Pennsylvania Abolition Society
Republican Party
secession crisis
slave emancipation
slave trade
soldier recruitment in the Union Army
southern refugees and Confederate deserters in the North
substitute and bounty brokers
Underground Railroad
Union officers and African American camp servants
Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon
United States Colored Troops
wage labor in the Civil War
William Still
Product details
- ISBN 9781469688381
- Weight: 458g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 01 Feb 2025
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices," institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it.
Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.
Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.
Brian P. Luskey is associate professor of history at West Virginia University and author of On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America.
