Literature Review: Race & Class in Nineteenth-Century America
May 2015
Jacob Lawrence, “And the migrants kept coming” (1940-41)
Scholarship on racial ideology and class formation are divided on key elements, viz., (1) the rigidity of race and racial identity, (2) whether race is a site for political articulation (and affirmation, i.e., “self-determination”) or an imposed and limiting social division that undermines political agency, and lastly, (3) how race (and a racialized political imagination) is an embedded feature of the history of American politics.
In order to arrive at the nineteenth century in this story, we must first begin with what Edmund Morgan called the “central paradox” in American history, the relationship between freedom and unfreedom in colonial America.[1]
Colonial America and the Formation of the Slave South
Morgan’s masterful American Slavery, American Freedom tackles the historical relationship between race-based American slavery and republican ideas of freedom. In his story of Virginia’s colonial development, Morgan shows how the first late-sixteenth century ambitions for the colony were led by a principle of living peacefully alongside American Indians, and the hope to relieve England of its growing poor population. But each experiment collapses time and time again due to a lack of resources, troubles in self-government, and strained labor relations. After a series of delays, Jamestown finally begins to show signs of productive life as indentured servants make their way to the colony. In this early period of colonial settlement open land was bountiful, and after serving theirs indentured servants were most likely to remain in the colonies and tend to a plot of their own. As this process became more systematic, mounting issues regarding land and labor took center stage in the colonies.
Morgan sharply delineates an emerging class division between small planters (the “freedmen,” as in, freed from indentured servitude) and the large planters (the elite) in Virginia on issues regarding, taxation, labor and land. As tensions increased, the mounting discontent from indentured servants and freedmen presented a threat to the status quo in the colony, and by 1675 it begun to erupt into a series of events we now call “Bacon’s Rebellion.” Morgan successfully shows how Nathanial Bacon opportunistically appealed to indentured servants and freedmen by playing on their frustrations. Although originally aimed solely at the American Indians, Bacon’s Rebellion would eventually denounce the colonial elite for their economic status in the colony. An enormous chasm had opened between the indentured servants and freedmen, on one side, and the large planters who served as officials in the colony, on the other. After the rebels burned Jamestown to the ground, those in power vowed to carefully police the rebellious tendencies of their indentured servants and freedmen.
At this historical juncture, black slavery becomes integral to the colonial labor force. Herein lies the crux of Morgan’s argument: It was through the introduction of slave labor that small and large planters were able to reconcile as a social group sharing common political interests. The presence of slaves relieved the elite’s demands on indentured servants and freedmen—in the form of labor, taxation, or by blocking political participation. Morgan writes “I believe partly because of slavery [freedmen] were allowed not only to prosper but also acquire social, psychological, and political advantages that turned the thrust of exploitation away from them and aligned them with the exploiters.”[2] The historical shift is one in which class distinction is drawn in terms of racially defined social boundaries between “those who labor” (black slaves) and “those who are free” (whites). According to Morgan, it was because slaves were not seen as men but as “laboring property” that Republican ideas of liberty could develop with such vehemence in the slave society of Virginia. In other words, “freedom from labor” was the defining ideological standpoint of the Virginia planter class.
Steering clear of vulgar economic explanations for slavery and racial ideology, Morgan is able to show how the needs of plantation life in the colonies propelled a system of slave labor relations, which created the necessary conditions for the political freedoms of white colonists. Race, in this sense, is part of a larger political ideology, a conceptual articulation of social divisions that grounds inequality on racial characteristics (i.e., a slave is a slave because he is black), which occludes a deeper understanding of how labor, property, and political power motivated such reified divisions.
On the subject of race as an ideological construction, Barbara Fields proposed,
“Race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of π) that can be plausibly imagined to live and eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons” (my emphasis). [3]
Fields’s article “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America” builds on Morgan’s work on colonial Virginia, she argues that the slave code grew from the needs of a slavery system. The systematic use of slaves in labor started by the 1660s, only after the cost of an African slave for life was more economic than employing English servants (especially since, as Fields notes, servants “stood a better- than-ever chance of dying before five years could elapse”—five-years, then common length for indentured servitude). This is what Fields calls the “morbid arithmetic change” in colonial Virginia. These calculations led to instituting legal statutes, which, in turn, left in place a powerful shaping mechanism that had concrete effects the development of social relations—not only between black and white people, but also between difference class members of the white population. “Ideology” is thus here understood as a “distillate of experience,” i.e., a formulation of understanding guided by experience (in this case, the need for labor in colonial Virginia) that then, in its articulation, shapes (gives form) to social life.[4] However, in order to have a living legacy, ideology must be verified in experience. From colonial times, through the Revolution and into the nineteenth century, Southern planters were the most politically powerful carriers (and, in part, organizers) of this particular historical experience. [5]
Into the Nineteenth Century
The world of nineteenth-century America was one in which the Southern planter class had consolidated its political power and asserted a relative regional autonomy from the manufacturing North. However, despite their apparent monopoly over Southern political imagination, a portion of the population in the South had little vested interest in the business of slavery. Steven Hahn has shown how small Southern famers (what Hahn calls the “white yeomanry”) asserted different social values than the class of planter elite. The distance of the white yeomanry from the compulsions of market-oriented production in the early nineteenth century provided them with a degree of relative independence to create a life outside the framework of the master- slave economic relation.[6]
In his study of antebellum upcountry Georgia, Hahn shows how yeomen in this region consciously rejected market forces, promoted self-dependence by means of subsistence farming, and relied on risk- mitigating community networks that stood antithetical to the commercial society of the planter-dominated Black Belt. This arrangement was disrupted by the explosion of the Civil War, provoking a political standoff between independent farmers and the large commercial planter aristocracy of the South. It was in the period when the political arrangement between small farmers and the large planter class that Morgan described in colonial times burst into the open; the yeoman class rebelled against what they understood as an increased dependence to the planter class that undermined their relative freedom. During the War, the implementation of conscription by the Confederacy in 1862 (quickly followed with an Exemption Act that gave slaveholders of twenty or more slaves a free pass) coupled with the economic hardships incurred by the yeomanry lead to desertions and growing sympathies with the Union.[7]
Hahn’s primary historiographical intervention is located in his proto-history of American Populism. He argues that the yeomen’s attitudes are significantly explained by their class standpoint as small landowners. According to this argument, the small farmers’ racist attitudes towards black Americans were borne from their understanding of slaves as held in the most extreme form of social dependence. For men whose values were grounded on independent property owners, slaves came to represent and embody the worst of yeomen’s fears: “the permanently dispossessed who fell subject to the wills of other men.”[8] Seen from this perspective, the racism of small producers in upcountry Georgia had little to do with race per se, rather it expressed (symptomatically) an increasingly hostile rejections of modern social dependence in moment of vast agricultural development.
While Populist historiography has moved away from the overtly dismissive comments by Richard Hofstadter, for whom the Populists were wrongly misguided romantics (at best), there remain many questions about the Populists’ attitudes toward race. Scholars like C. Vann Woodward wrote that in its earnest beginnings the People’s Party presented a real opportunity for racially integrated political efforts (i.e., beyond anything ever imagined by the leaders of the Republican Party).[9] But at their worst, Populists sought political recognition on the national stage by affirming the racism of the demoted planter class. Woodward’s portrait of Tom Watson fits the bill: Watson campaigned in Georgia under an explicitly racist program, arguing that “only after the Negro was eliminated from politics could Populists principles gain a hearing.”[10]
More recent scholarship, exemplified by Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision, underlines that negative attitudes toward race and miscegenation were common across the movement. With some notable exceptions, according to Postel, Populists viewed segregation and the subordination of black Americans as “an essential part of the new South doctrine of progressive development,”[11] thus posing insurmountable obstacles for building cross-racial solidarity.
Postel’s book presents a bold new thesis on the Populist movement; his emphasis is on the interpretation of Populism as an expression of business interests of the American small farmer. Similar to Hahn’s presentation, although with a vastly different political inflection, Postel argues that the nature of Populism is situated in the small farmer’s commercial stake in the face of a modern economy. Rather than backward-looking reformers, Postel presents the rank and file of the Populist movement as modernizers who fought against the corporate order pursued by Northern capitalists in order to pursue an “alternative capitalism in which private enterprise coalesced with both cooperative and state-based economies.”[12]
In the late nineteenth century, it was in and through this political ideology of the productive middle— i.e., property-owning small farmers squeezed by commercial agricultural relations—that Populism came to shore up racist attitudes of white supremacy in the American South and Western states. While the Civil War had broken the pact between small farmers and large planters, the remnants of racial ideology survived the War and were re-inscribed onto the unequal labor relations of postbellum America. It was in this context that racial discrimination was unconsciously absorbed into a self-avowed democratic movement like Populism.[13]
The North: Whiteness and Labor
The turn towards “whiteness studies” in the 1990s, led by historian David Roediger's 1991 book The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, prompted a reconsideration of racial construction in the United States.14 Studies inspired by Roediger attempted to show how the fundamental components of American labor politics grew from laborers' counter-racial identification with American black slaves, i.e., through the affirmation of their rights as white free laborers. For Roediger, nineteenth-century labor politics failed to supersede the limitations of American "Herrenvolk Republicanism," and thus reproduced fundamentally racist divisions in their struggle against encroaching capitalist demands (e.g., the lengthening of the working-day, debtor’s prison, etc.).[15]
In the introduction of The Wages of Whiteness, Roediger offers his work as a corrective against the crude economic determinism of previous Marxist historical studies. Although he cites Barbara Fields’s 1982 essay favorably, Roediger explicitly contradicts her primary claim that race is solely a subjective category while class, on the other hand, has both a subjective and an objective dimension.[16] According to Fields, racial perception has no basis on actual differences in the biological make-up between races. Class, however, is both a (1) subjective expression, i.e., the expressed recognition (i.e., class-consciousness) of a shared interest and potential to challenge capitalism, but it also (2) defines an objective position within the production process, i.e., it refers to the structural position of workers in the process of capital production. Class-consciousness is far from a spontaneous outcome of this objective position, rather, it is the result of attempts making explicit (and thus, conscious) the social potential within the process of capital production that could, through political mediation be directed towards the abolition of capitalism. In contrast to Fields’s claim, Roediger asserts that both class and race are solely subjective phenomena.[17]
Roediger, distances himself from a Marxist articulation of class in order to examine the construct of race as independent from class relations. Despite his stated attempt to ground racial constructs in their historical context, Roediger’s conceptual emphasis on language ends up naturalizing the very concepts of race he seeks to explain. By citing mentions of “white” or “negro” as definitive instances of the formation of white identity, and without rendering explicit the varied and sometimes contradictory uses of these categories by social actors, Roediger obscures the very object he seeks to elucidate, i.e., the nature of anti- black racism among white workingmen.
Peter Kolchin has pointed out an important ambiguity in Roediger’s study: whereas Roediger notes with great emphasis the difference between the use of “wage labor” and that of “white labor” he often collapses the terms “negro” and “slave” into one concept.[18] This slippage allows Roediger to align laborers’ counter-identification with slaves to a counter-identification with black Americans. In turn, Roediger attributes the failure to popularize the term “wage-slavery” among laborers to the common defense of their “whiteness;” and presents the replacement of the term “master” to “boss” as evidence of laborers’ protective affirmation of their status as white Americans. Though his vernacular history provides a glimpse into changing social relations, a problem with Roediger’s approach is that the historical explanatory power of “whiteness” is lacking. As Kolchin has succinctly put it, “The question is not whether white racism was pervasive in antebellum American—it was—but whether it explains as much as Roediger and others maintain.”[19]
The process of racial construction is social, and thus embedded within the history of social relations. An analysis of these relations is thus key for deepening a historical understanding of racial divisions. In whiteness studies inspired by Roediger’s intervention, the immigrant worker is often the subject of study. The emphasis on assimilation into a culture of a “white” working class is given more attention in these works, than why such racial understanding gained any traction. In contrast to this perspective, Albon Man's article “Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863” sought to place Irish violence against black Americans within the context of a competitive labor market. Man argued that insofar as Irish men occupied precarious employment as unskilled workers in the 1840s and 1850s, and as long as capitalists used black Americans to break the strikes of Irish longshoremen, tension between the two groups was bound to burst into the open. Writing in the same decade, historian Bernard Mandel pointed to how both the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church actively propagandized among Irish workers and called on them to defend their jobs from the influx of employment-seeking Southern blacks.[20] This body of work highlights how politics and material conditions both played key roles in shaping working-class attitudes towards black Americans.
In approaching the formation of race, both Man and Mandel, highlighted the political and economic conditions shaping the historically specific content of racial divisions. They argued that at key moments in American history, racial divisions were used to promulgate a system of domination, and through these historical conjunctures racial categories gained a new meaning. By doing so, both Man and Mandel attempted to illuminate the very process of construction that whiteness studies sought to understand. Both however, emphasized the embedded nature of racial relations in on-going processes of political and economic domination.
Race during and after Reconstruction
C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, 1877 – 1913 highlights that even prior to the Populists’ efforts, some small farmers (e.g., in Mississippi) had responded to the encroaching interests of wealthier whites in the South by calling for the disenfranchisement of black Americans in Redeemer-dominated regions.21 Woodward carefully parses out the reasoning behind this strategy and argues that poor whites saw the black votes as significantly tipping the scale for the wealthier white Southern politicians. While this plot mobilized, i.e., politically instrumentalized, racist sensibilities, the primary target of the operation were not black Americans, but, rather, the wealthy leaders of political rule. Woodward’s insight here about the nature of this period is worth underlining: the primary lines on the sand in the South where not drawn between “white supremacy” and black Americans, rather, the conflict hinged on who among those white Southerners would rule the new regime (and in what direction).
Northern political imagination after the War was also fraught with new divisions over class and race. As Republicans faced the colossal task of post-war Reconstruction, ideological divisions over the future of freedmen, the role of the planter class in the post-war south, and labor demands, flung into the open thus creating irreparable divisions among Republican Party members.[22] Building on the work of David Montgomery, Heather Cox Richardson has charted the spread of labor unrest under Reconstruction. In her book, she describes the historic summer of 1867 when strikes across the South, notably in Mobile and Charleston, witnessed organized dockworkers and longshoremen pushing for higher wages.[23] Alongside these men, the organization of agricultural workers was most impressive; Union League representatives encouraged freedmen to boycott conservative planters, seize crops if they were defrauded, slow down work, and squat on planters’ lands.[24] The Associated Press reported in detail riots in Richmond, Virginia; throughout the country, it seemed, workers took to the streets in unprecedented numbers.[25] These actions led conservative and moderate Republicans to equate Southern freedmen with labor radicals who believed in class struggle.[26] While Republicans had until then failed to grasp the emerging class divisions among black men and women, the summer of 1867 revealed to these Northerners the “dramatic rift in the black community between those with property and those who had none.”[27] The class differentiation among free black people in the South plays a critical role in Richardson’s study: By presenting how post-war class conflict affected the future of freedmen, Richardson is capable of showing the new lines of ideological divisions between the unskilled or semiskilled ex-slaves who made up the bulk of the South’s black population and Northern politicians paired with prominent African-Americans who tended to preach Republican political economy and promote labor discipline in order to achieve prosperity.
Richardson shows how Northern politicians feared the cooperation between freedmen and workers to strike for higher wages or better working conditions, in this climate Republicans were more concerned that freedmen would follow the example of disaffected Northern laborers who, in their eyes, “refused to work for their own success.”[28] Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional reports, and private correspondence, Richardson portrays a telling portrait of Reconstruction America, where the political agitation of the early 1870s in South Carolina and Louisiana, the demand for civil rights, and the fears spurned by the 1871 Paris Commune, drove Republicans to agree with Democrats’ concerns that freedmen hoped to gain better conditions through federal support instead of advancing through the discipline of free labor. Richardson notes how, “This increasing consensus between moderate Democrats, independents, and Republicans reflected a political realignment in the country;”[29] the divisions of this new realignment were drawn on the basis of novel concerns with organized labor and the political volatility of Southern freedmen. Of course race was always part of the debate involving black men and women, but in in the final conflict, “Northerners turned against freedpeople after the Civil War because African Americans came to represent a concept of society and government that would destroy the free labor world;”[30] By taking up political organization, demanding better wages and laboring conditions, and challenging the direction of the Reconstruction government, “Black citizens, it seemed, threatened the core of American society.”[31]
Richardson’s argument builds on both Woodward and Montgomery, who both stressed that the capacious category of race would miss the operating political dynamics in post-war America. Like Woodward, who focuses his energies on divisions within the New South, Cohen presents a divided polity in the Reconstruction period where laboring Northern white laborers, and skilled and semiskilled black Americans came under attack by the white politicians in power on the basis of their protests against a system of labor.
As Reconstruction came to an end some in the post-war period voiced their profound disenchantment with democracy in racialized terms. One of these was nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman, who would make his views explicit in an 1878 article aptly titled, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.” Parkman argued that “the municipal corruptions of New York and the monstrosities of negro rule in South Carolina” proved that when the “dangerous classes,”— the “ignorant proletariat” and the newly freed men—demanded equality, the “liberty of the nation” was under threat. He bemoaned the world borne of universal suffrage since “in their hearts, the masses of the nation cherish desires not only different from it, but inconsistently with it. They want equality more than they want liberty.” As far as Parkman was concerned it was the laborers and black Americans who were responsible for national instability. Like Parkman, some Progressives, influential among Northerners, (including E.H. Godkin, et. al.) turned their backs on universal democracy and preached the march of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”[32] As Parkman and Godkin’s views exemplify, racism in in the post-Reconstruction world increasingly expressed a deepening anxiety over the project of democracy in the face of growing economic inequality and protests by those who felt left out of the post-war agenda.
Race is not “reducible” to class, rather, racial ideology employs racial divisions in order to mask unfree social relations. But this entanglement is not self-explanatory (in the abstract), rather, historians must to do the work in unpacking and defining how racial ideology is embedded in social relationships specific to a historical context. The relationship between race and class in colonial America and its transformation throughout the nineteenth century can only be understood through recreating the world in which such terms made sense, and asking to whom do they make sense, and what function did they serve in relation to the whole.
Racial configurations are not simple “reflections” of class divisions. Often, as I have tried to show, they are heavily mediated through different forms of misrecognition and ideological muddiness. They express the unfreedom of society, while masking its source. Instead, black Americans are targeted as the culprits behind social ailments, e.g., unemployment, social dependence, political instability, and the crisis of mass democracy.
Class, in the Marxist tradition, is both a structural standpoint within a system of production, and (when it is articulated politically) a rallying force behind political consciousness, but there is no one-to-one relationship between these two dimensions. Irish workers faced with precarious employment in the nineteenth century condemned the black strikebreakers for their troubles, even though a much larger mechanism of labor relations was at the root of their discontent. Nothing about being a worker leads to a “higher” or “more enlightened” consciousness; that is the goal of political education. What the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show is that a labor movement in America is hopeless without an understanding of the divisive ideology of race and racism.
1. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1975).
2. Morgan, 344.
3. Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America” New Left Review (May–June 1990), pp. 95 - 118.
4. Fields, 112.
5. A challenge to both Morgan and Fields can be found in Winthrop D. Jordan’s The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (1974). Jordan’s book begins with a discursive approach to English racial imagination. By examining texts retelling the impressions and experiences of the first encounters with African blacks, Winthrop weaves an image of Elizabethan views of “blackness” as ugly, dirty, uncivilized, beast-like, sexually lascivious and deviant, and heathen in the eyes of the English. He stresses that this perspective remained in the back of the English social imagination and flared up in later years as part of the justification for black slavery. Jordan targets crude economistic historical perspectives that see the emergence of black slavery in the American colonies stemming solely from labor demands and economic calculation. He writes that although the economic is central to the story of Atlantic Slavery in the English colonies, there remains the issue of how blackness was interpreted, and in what way African subjects met the “criteria” for enslavement in the colonial world. Thus Winthrop spends a good deal of time in explaining the conditions of first contact with native blacks in Africa. He wants to show the ways in which these first impressions left behind a conceptual framework and lasting a subjective experience that informed colonial practices against blacks in later years. These impressions, argues Winthrop, became part of a popular English social imagination that cannot be ignored by historians when dealing with slavery practices in the English colonies.
Though insightful, Jordan is at times vague about the specific intersections of race and class relations surrounding slavery. He seems to offer that slavery and race were mutually constitutive social relations, and “seemed to have generated each other,” noting that, after all, “Both […] were twin aspects of a general debasement of the Negro.” But this formulation raises more questions than answers. When Jordan does finally bring up the issue of class, it is in the case of the American colonies and the “blurred” class lines between freedmen (freed indentures servants) and large property holders with greater capital resources. While Jordan correctly notes how the availability of land in the early colonial period did blur these class relations, the story becomes incredibly more complicated when we look at the period after the 1620s tobacco boom in Virginia, when freedmen and large planters butted heads over labor terms and property relations that would make class a key issue in the introduction of slavery in the region (as noted by both Morgan and Fields).
Winthrop Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
6. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850- 1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Barbara Fields, “The Nineteenth-Century American South: History and Theory” in Plantation Society in the Americas 1 (April 1983).
7. Hahn, 122-126.
8. Hahn, 285.
9. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1957).
10. Woodward, 90.
11. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 175.
12. Postel, 5.
13. It is worth noting that in contrast to Postel, Robert Wiebe argued that the Populists had no real sense of class. Rather, he notes that they rejected class divisions and “insisted that a whole people would rise up and by the simple act of emerging set the world of natural law aright.” Wiebe comments that perhaps this was the way in which agrarian dissenters were “trapped within their own democratic ideology,” i.e., by affirming the democratic principle before it was won they misconstrued the obstacles they faced.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 100.
14. David, Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992); For other accounts of nineteenth-century racial identity construction among laboring American, please see, Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
15. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 60.
16. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” 143–177.
17. Fields’s articulation of the objective and subjective dimensions of class maps on to what Marx referred to as the differences between a class “in-itself” and a class “for-itself.” This formulation by Marx highlights a key distinction between the (1) historical appearance of a modern working class on the world stage, i.e., the spread of a sector of the population devoid of land and thus devoid of the means to reproduce their livelihood other than selling their labor-power on the market, and the (2) conscious articulation of a working-class politics. While the former is the outcome of transformations in the material processes of production, the latter requires active working-class associations, conscious deliberation on means and ends, and, ultimately, political confrontation. Clarifying this distinction, Marx wrote,
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
Far from conceiving of working-class politics as the already-determined outcome of economic processes, in these lines quoted above Marx highlights that the confrontation against capitalist conditions are part of the process of formulating a working-class politics but one based on actual contradictions within the capitalist system. Only through the process of class struggle could potentiality be transformed into actuality.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to The Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, “Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy” in Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 211-12 (my emphasis).
18. Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America” The Journal of American History 89, No. 1 (June, 2002): 154-73.
19. Kolchin, 164, my emphasis.
20. Albon P. Man, Jr., “Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863,” The Journal of Negro History 36, no. 4 (October, 1951), 375–405; Bernard Mandel, Labor, Free and Slave: Workingmen and the Anti-Slavery Movement In the United States (1955) (Reprinted, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 2007). Later scholarship with a similar framework includes, Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800- 1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980) and Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1990).
21. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951; reprint, Baton Rouge, 1971).
22. David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862-1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967).
23. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865- 1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
24. Richardson, 50.
25. Richardson, 50-52.
26. Richardson, 48.
27. Richardson, 52.
28. Richardson, 60.
29. Richardson, 120.
30. Richardson, 120.
31. Richardson, 120.
32. Armstrong, William M., E. L. Godkin: A Biography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978), 48.
