Monumental and revelatory, Free Labor explores labor activism throughout the country during a period of incredible diversity and fluidity: the American Civil War.

Mark A. Lause describes how the working class radicalized during the war as a response to economic crisis, the political opportunity created by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and the ideology of free labor and abolition. His account moves from battlefield and picket line to the negotiating table, as he discusses how leaders and the rank-and-file alike adapted tactics and modes of operation to specific circumstances. His close attention to women and African Americans, meanwhile, dismantles notions of the working class as synonymous with whiteness and maleness.

In addition, Lause offers a nuanced consideration of race's role in the politics of national labor organizations, in segregated industries in the border North and South, and in black resistance in the secessionist South, creatively reading self-emancipation as the largest general strike in U.S. history.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Prologue. The Antebellum Labor Crisis: Organized Workers as a Force in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Part I. Labor, Liberty, and Union 1. Workers and the Crisis of Nationhood: The Social Republic, Peace, and the Union 2. Continuities of Class: The Persistence of Labor Struggles 3. Organized Labor Goes to War: The Fate of the Old Workers' Movement Part II. Remaking the Work Force 4. The Great Slave Strike: Emancipation and Race 5. The Alienation of Militancy: Immigrants and the New White Workingmen 6. The Survival of Moral Suasion: Solidarity, Sisterhood, and Paternalism Part III. War, Revolution, and Labor 7. New Militancy across the Union: The Strike Waves and Labor Movements of 1863 8. Richmond, New Orleans, Nashville: The Diverse Experience of Urban Labor in the South 9. The State Power: Workers and the New Authorities, North and South Part IV. Shaping the Postwar Order 10. The Emergence of Labor Reform: Class, Citizenship, and Politics 11. Toward a National Labor Presence: Exploring the Class Limits of Respectability 12. A Peace of Sorts: Labor, Liberty, and Respectability Epilogue. 1877: Reconstructions of Class Notes Index | "An illuminating and persuasive retelling of the Civil War from the bottom up." —Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
"Mark A. Lause's deeply researched study of labor during the Civil War is an ambitious effort to change how we understand the significance of the Civil War and the history of the American labor movement, together."—Journal of American History
"Historian Lause (Univ. of Cincinnati) significantly helps expand knowledge of the US labor movement in the period up to, during, and immediately after the Civil War. Highly recommended,"—Choice
|Mark A. Lause is a professor of American history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of A Secret Society History of the Civil War and Race and Radicalism in the Union Army.