Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 12 Wage Slavery

At the time when Lyddie was a young woman, the United States was experiencing rapid growth of factories in the North while also holding three million African Americans in slavery in the South. It was the only nation to experience what economists call a “takeoff” toward industrialization while having such a huge commitment to racial slavery. Its growing number of white, waged workers compared their plight to the much larger number of enslaved workers in ways that the novel illustrates. Like Lyddie, many treasured independence, not only the kind that came from winning a revolution against Britain, but also the kind that came from having land and not having to work for a “boss” (then a new word added to American English from the Dutch language). When many lost their land, or could not provide property to all adult children in big farm families, they suddenly faced the lack of freedom that came from being on a closely timed work schedule, scrutinized by managers. When Lyddie could not get the song “I Will Not Be a Slave” out of her head, when her factory work sped up and pay fell, and when friends died from occupational diseases, or suffered sexual violence from factory managers, she, like hundreds of thousands of others forced from farms to factories, feared being “like a slave.”

As Northern workers protested through labor organizations they sometimes described their situation as that of “wage slavery.” More broadly, concern over “white slavery” entered national debates, with supporters of Southern slavery sometimes using it when they self-servingly argued that whites in Northern factories were somehow worse off than those actually held in bondage. Such a use of “white slavery” often implied that slavery was especially wrong if whites were its victims. It did not lead to support for those actually enslaved.

Black activists seeking to abolish Southern slavery took a very firm line against supposing that the miseries of wage labor were comparable to those of the enslaved. Many such activists had escaped slavery and could draw direct comparisons. Perhaps most skilled at doing so was Frederick Douglass, whose hot-selling autobiography Lyddie read. Douglass, a formerly enslaved abolitionist who often directly weighed the violence of the plantation against the unfairness of Northern workplaces, preferring the latter even when racist practices kept him at times from getting jobs there. Douglass supported demands of the white, and especially the Irish, poor but he firmly opposed loose usage of terms like “white slavery.” He insisted that the levels of misery involved were incomparable and sometimes refused to speak alongside white activists who pretended otherwise. Northern workers had the right to quit terrible jobs as slaves did not..

Douglass also worked closely with women reformers seeking to address inequalities in political and property rights between women and men. They sometimes spoke in terms of “sex slavery” but seldom insisted that their oppression was commensurate with that suffered by the enslaved. Douglass and other Black abolitionists showed much more sympathy to this more careful comparison with Southern slavery. Lyddie’s character, educated by her life-changing encounter with the escaped enslaved person Ezekial and by Douglass, used awareness of slavery to think through the many oppressions she suffered but did not suppose that her plight approximated that of those trapped on the plantations.

About the Author

Dr. David Roediger, the Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas and author of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.