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A moral
contract
A decade ago, when associate professor of history Amy Dru Stanley
began researching the intellectual history of contractual relationships
during the Reconstruction era, she avoided discussion of the matter
entirely. Her topic, she found, was too obscure for others to easily
grasp. “But,” she quickly adds, “things have changed
since then.” Indeed. Her resulting book, From Bondage to
Contract, received the 1999 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for
best first book in U.S. history, the 1999 Morris D. Forkosch Award
for best book in intellectual history, and the 1999 Avery O. Craven
Award for best book on the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In the book, Stanley—who taught at the University of California,
Irvine, before joining the Chicago faculty in 1994—starts with
the assumption that contractual relations form the basis of American
social structure. Focusing on labor and marriage agreements, she
shows that the liberation of slaves opened up a Pandora’s box
of unintended consequences: If the government could free the slave
from the status of dependent, what about the wage laborer who depended
on his master’s minimal wages to survive, and what of the women
who lived as legal dependents under their husbands’ authority?
Using government documents, Congressional records, legal cases
and treatises, economic and reform tracts, newspapers, social investigations,
and personal papers, Stanley illustrates the underlying problem
of contract freedom: In an utterly free market, contract relations
of buying and selling might be defined as boundless, but this would
be morally inconsistent with recognition of the human self as sacred
and the conviction that boundaries to market relations must therefore
exist.
From Bondage to Contract exposes this Reconstruction-era
dichotomy between the free market ideal of contract and the idea
of contract embodied in the abolition of slavery. The central dilemma
for Americans in the era of slave emancipation, explains Stanley,
“was to figure out the boundary, to draw a line between what
parts of human existence would be subject for sale and what parts
had to be sacrosanct, completely divorced from market relations.”
These dilemmas still exist, she argues. “It’s an enduring
belief that some things must never be for sale, that the very legitimacy
of our free market rests on the fact that there are moral boundaries,”
says Stanley. “Market relations grow ever more pervasive. Think,
for example, about the sale of babies, the sale of wombs, the sale
of body parts. Questions of contract linger on, and they were raised
in a very urgent and epic historical way in the 19th century.”—B.B.
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