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ISR Issue 55, November–December 2007
REVIEWS
White workers and the fight against slavery
Bernard Mandel
Introduction by Brian Kelly
Labor, Free and Slave: Workingmen and the Anti-Slavery Movement in the United States
University of Illinois Press, 2007
256 pages $25
Review by KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR
LABOR HISTORIAN Brian Kelly has done a huge service for those interested in the politics of the antislavery movement in the Civil War era. Through Kelly’s efforts, Bernard Mandel’s excellent analysis of the abolitionist movement’s relationship to the American labor movement has been brought to life for a new generation of historians and activists.
Labor, Free and Slave was originally published more than fifty years ago—against the stifling backdrop of McCarthyism—by a handful of left-wing intellectuals. No major publisher would touch Mandel’s book. For Mandel, who was an important figure in the labor and political Left of Cleveland, Ohio, his book wasn’t an academic exercise. He was trying to use Marxism to analyze another political period in which the labor movement was limited by its inability to adequately address the racism that shaped the lives of Black freedmen and Black slaves.
While this attempt brought scorn from the McCarthyites, Mandel has also been castigated more recently by leading academics from the field of “whiteness studies.” Mandel is accused of being a crude determinist and dismissing the racism of white workers because he offers a material explanation of it. Kelly responds:
Whiteness scholarship exhibits an extreme philosophical idealism more in common with the moralist temperament of mid-nineteenth-century evangelicals than with Marxist materialism. Strident in its espousal of the “abolition of whiteness” and the “creation of a culture of working class non-whiteness,” its approach to social transformation bears a marked resemblance to the [followers of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison], for whom…“the reformation of the self had to precede…collective action in general.”
Thus, Labor, Free and Slave is neither “new” nor “groundbreaking.” Rather, the republication of Mandel’s book is a welcome attempt at reintroducing the tools of Marxist analysis into the debates on the relationships of race and class in the Civil War era—harking back to W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 classic, Black Reconstruction.
Mandel’s main question is the attitude of white workers and the nascent labor movement toward the Northern abolitionist movement. Many “whiteness” theorists take this period as a launching point for white workers’ “racial identity.” The argument is that the hostility between the labor movement and the abolitionist movement is one of race. In other words, white workers could not be expected to agitate for the freedom of Black slaves because they were racist. Indeed, this is one part of the picture. But it’s not the whole picture. For example, while the Irish are usually condemned for racism in Northern cities in the Civil War era, the German immigrants were viewed differently. One pro-slavery Louisiana newspaper wrote of Germans:
It is in their interest to abolish Slavery; and we know full well the disposition of man to promote all things which advance his own interest. These men come from nations where slavery is not allowed and they drink in abolition sentiment from their mothers’ breast.
Mandel uses magazine and newspaper articles, poems, books, and political leaflets and pamphlets to paint a more nuanced and complex picture of white workers’ consciousness. The main period taken up in the book is the 1830s through the 1850s—the beginnings of American industrialization, when the new American working class toiled in misery and cries of “white slavery” became commonplace. In fact, a major aspect of Southern planter propaganda was to highlight the plight of Northern workers as impoverished, hungry, diseased, and without assistance when they were old and sick.
Instead of relating to that sentiment, writes Mandel, the abolitionist movement rejected any comparison of slaves to free workers. Many held up the wage system and “free labor” as aspirations for any society. In fact, well-known Kentucky abolitionist Cassius Clay went so far as to say of labor, in response to a movement for a ten-hour workday:
I am in favor of limiting Labor to such hours, as are mutually agreed upon by the labor and his employer.… As a general rule salaries should be low.
William Lloyd Garrison was vociferous in his refusal to make any connection between the condition of Northern workers and Southern slaves, using his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, to chastise the labor movement. This inevitably impacted the consciousness of white workers and their engagement with abolitionism. Mandel is scathing in his treatment of the abolitionist movement—too much so. He is almost dismissive of the movement’s impact because of the middle-class orientation of part of the abolitionist movement.
In fact, abolitionism became one of the most important multiracial radical movements in U.S. history, with a militant wing led by ex-slave Frederick Douglass. The movement’s overall impact is difficult to deny. By the Civil War, the vast majority of white Northerners were against slavery.
The real contribution of Mandel is to convey how the political interplay between white workers and the abolitionist movement bore a complexity far beyond the cry of whiteness theorists that white workers were uniformly racist—a view that suggests that there was no debate or discussion. In fact, the conservative section of the abolitionist movement was but one factor in shaping white workers’ attitudes. Mandel shows that, prior to the late 1840s and early 1850s, many workers thought slavery would just die out. It was not until the seizure of Texas and then all of northern Mexico—and the accompanying agitation from Southern slaveholders for the expansion of slavery into the new territories—that antislavery sentiment really became politically dominant. But it was the abolitionist movement that helped give expression to the sentiment in an organized way through rallies, newsletters, town-hall meetings, and other agitation.
Another important contribution is Mandel’s discussion of class conflict in the South and the class consciousness of the Southern planter aristocracy. Because of the dominance of whiteness theory and its underlying assumption that white supremacy and racism were beneficial to all whites, there has been a systematic underestimate of class conflict among whites. Mandel exhumes this history of intra-racial conflict—again in the tradition of Black Reconstruction—and reveals the extent to which the Southern elite was contemptuous of all labor. John C. Calhoun, a notorious racist and slaveholder, said that slavery was not just good for “inferior races” but “inferior classes” as well. The Richmond Enquirer went so far as to argue that
the defense of slavery has labored under great difficulties, because its apologists…took halfway ground. They confined the defense to mere negro slavery, thereby giving up the slavery principle…. Human experience [shows] the universal success of slave society, and the universal failure of free society.... The South now maintains that slavery is right, natural and necessary.… While it is far more obvious that negroes be slaves than whites…the principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion.
By the end of the book, which extends into the postwar period, the issue becomes the emergent labor movement’s posture toward the newly freed Black workers. Mandel recognizes that while the potential for a strong labor movement existed, the reluctance of large sections of the movement to take up the explicit defense of Black workers against racism, North and South, severely limited both labor’s effectiveness and the movement’s ability to recruit Black workers.
It’s good that this book is back in print. The question of Black and white unity is not just one for historians. When “Latino” is inserted, alongside “Black” and “white,” one can see that the question of multiracial unity within the labor movement continues to be the dominant political issue of our day.
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