Employment

The importance of labor to the Civil War can hardly be overstated. Workers served in the ranks and provided the materiel used to wage the war. Moreover, ideological and political conflicts over what form of labor was best for the United States played a critical role in precipitating the conflict.

For the first half-century or so of the United States’s existence, two labor systems existed in a general state of harmony. Although not all of the laborers in the South were slaves, slavery certainly formed the backbone of the Southern ECONOMY. Meanwhile, Northern factories and farms were worked by free laborers. The balance between these two systems was upset in the 1840s and 1850s as the North became increasingly industrialized. Northerners took pride in the freedom and upward mobility that being a free laborer could provide. Slavery came under attack for its inefficiency more than for its inhumanity. Southerners tried to defend slave labor, emphasizing how much more humanely slaves were treated in comparison with factory workers.

Ultimately, free labor versus slave labor became the dominant political issue of the 1850s. Over the course of the decade, advocates of free labor gathered into the Republican Party, which celebrated free labor as its main issue. Prominent Republicans traveled around the country, arguing that the strength of the United States derived from the opportunity for advancement provided by the free-labor system. Slavery, meanwhile, posed a threat to the continued existence of free labor. William H. Seward described the tension between the two as an “irrepressible conflict,” and Abraham Lincoln warned that “a house divided upon itself cannot stand.” The Republican platforms of 1856 and 1860 committed the party to a specific plan with regard to the future of slave and free labor. Both stated that the party had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed, but the platforms also avowed that the institution would not be allowed to spread elsewhere in the country. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Southerners correctly perceived this as a sign that slavery’s future was in question, and SECESSION soon followed.

Ironically, as the country’s focus was on a philosophical debate about labor, actual laborers themselves were not doing especially well. Although the conditions of their work varied widely, slaves in the South were often subject to great cruelties. In both the North and the South, the PANIC OF 1857 had undermined wages and cost thousands of workers their jobs.

The South’s white labor force was the first to feel the influence of the Civil War. Although many skilled laborers enlisted in the army, a substantial number took advantage of the draft exemption provided them and remained on the HOMEFRONT. Those who remained behind found themselves very busy with construction and manufacturing projects, and they helped to keep the Confederate war effort on track. The wages paid by both government and private jobs were quite good, but ultimately they did not match the runaway inflation that gripped the South in the latter half of the war. This resulted in a number of STRIKES, including an 1864 incident where workers from every branch of the government went on strike at the same time.

While white workers continued to provide most of the South’s skilled labor during the Civil War, unskilled labor was increasingly the responsibility of slaves, women, and children. Agricultural work was the most important form of unskilled labor they performed, but they also played significant roles in the manufacturing sector. As much as skilled labor suffered from inflation, unskilled labor suffered even more. Slaves availed themselves of the opportunity to escape when they could. Other unskilled laborers, especially white women, did not have the option of escape, nor did they generally have the leverage to organize and go on strike. Sometimes the only recourse available was violence. The most famous incident in the Confederacy was the Richmond bread riots of 1863, when a mob of women marched through the capital, inflicting a great deal of damage along the way. JEFFERSON DAViS intervened personally and broke the demonstration up.

The North also had its share of labor tension during the Civil War, although it was generally longer in coming. The economic malaise precipitated by the panic of 1857 lasted until the middle of the war, which meant that unemployment rates remained high in 1861 and 1862. As the North recovered, a similar division developed in the workforce there as in the South. Skilled jobs were monopolized by white Protestant men, and unskilled jobs went to Irish Catholics, African Americans, women, and children.

For most of the war, wage increases for both skilled and unskilled workers lagged 25 percent or more behind inflation-related price increases, despite the fact that Northern industry was doing a remarkably good job of sustaining the Union war machine. Between this and the high rates of unemployment, the North had a great deal of labor unrest during the war. Skilled workers generally chose to organize into unions and to strike. Their strikes were often successful, and by 1864 the wages of skilled workers generally paced increases in the cost of living. Unskilled workers, on the other hand, fell further and further behind. Sometimes there were attempts to organize these workers. One notable example was the 1863 formation of the Workingwomen’s Protective Union, a group of New York seamstresses. The union struck and was rewarded with a wage increase by order of Abraham Lincoln. This was the exception to the rule, however. In general, the only choice for unhappy unskilled workers was protest. The New York City draft riot of 1863, for example, was in part caused by Irish workers who resented the threat posed by free African-American labor.

For many workers, the postwar era marked a return to the status quo. The number of women in war-related jobs dropped as men returned from the military. One exception was the white-collar jobs that women flocked to in Washington, D. C., and Richmond. African Americans in the North were still relegated to underpaid unskilled jobs, while a majority of African Americans in the South went from slavery to sharecropping. Sharecropping may have been an improvement over slavery, but it still retained as many vestiges of the “peculiar institution” as white Southerners could get away with under the terms of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Civil War did bring one important change to employment patterns, namely the increased strength of the labor movement. Skilled laborers had organized frequently during the war, with some success. Their labor organizations survived the war and continued to grow. The most prominent was the National Labor Union, which eventually came to be known as the American Federation of Labor. By the early 1870s, a larger percentage of the workforce was unionized than at any other point in the 19th century.

For the Republicans, the postwar relationship with labor was mixed. Although they had triumphed in the Civil War, and the free-labor ideology had won the day, there was an increasing divide between the party and labor. By 1870, two-thirds of Americans were wage earners, and they increasingly came to see the social and financial mobility promised by the free-labor ideology as an illusion. Through the rest of the 19th century, the Republican party became increasingly identified with the interests of the managerial class, while laborers moved into the Democratic fold, an arrangement that has lasted to the present day.

Further reading: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1994); David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967).

—Christopher Bates