From Bondage to Contract

Download or read book From Bondage to Contract written by Amy Dru Stanley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-13 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how a generation of American thinkers and reformers - abolitionists, former slaves, feminists, labor advocates, jurists, moralists, and social scientists - drew on contract to condemn the evils of chattel slavery as well as to measure the virtues of free society. Their arguments over the meaning of slavery and freedom were grounded in changing circumstances of labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At the heart of these arguments lay the problem of defining which realms of self and social existence could be rendered market commodities and which could not. From Bondage to Contract reveals how the problem of distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not reflected the ideological and social changes wrought by the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North.