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David R. Roediger and John Ashworth discuss the implications and the debate over the term “White Slavery” and how it was used in mid-19th century America. This term, as Roediger says, sparked when the editor of The Plebeian, Levi Slamm, organized a protest referred to as the “coffin handbill protest” using pamphlets that harshly depicted white laborers as slaves to the industrialized wage system. (Roediger 347) However, while Roediger is focused on attempting to define the phrases “white slavery,” “wage slavery,” or “slavery of wages,” I believe Ashworth successfully shows that the issue of wage slavery was merely pinned onto the issue of, as Roediger calls it, chattel slavery and detracts from the abolitionist movement.
As Roediger put it on page 346, “The advantages of the phrase white slavery over wage slavery or slavery of wages lay in the former term’s vagueness and in its whiteness.” Using these words, he says, allowed radical democrats to “cast” abolitionists, free blacks, bankers, factory owners and prison labor, “as villains in a loose plot to enslave white workers.” The idea being democrats could unite their supporters under the term “white slavery,” and use it to attack the wage system. However, this is inherently flawed because the issues of black slavery and the wage system’s oppression are fundamentally different. Roediger admits this contradiction on page 347. He says, “The tendency to indict white slavery and to support Black slavery was especially strong [in New York].” At its core, a white slave abolitionist may very well attack the wage system but not necessarily oppose black slavery, and I think Roediger becomes too focused on defining the different terms and misses this larger picture. As Will pointed out in his blog post, the comparison of a white and a black slave, where the black man is protected, clothed, and fed by his slaver while the white man is alone and overburdened by his multiple “masters,” is a biased and rationalized excuse. Roediger admits in his conclusion, “Chattel slavery was, in this view, better than white slavery, a point fraught with proslavery paternalist implications and not lost on the southern editors who reprinted articles carrying such opinions.”
The problem with Roediger’s essay, as I said before, is that he is misguided in his argument. The coupling of wage slavery with black slavery was detrimental to the abolitionist movement and even to white slavery-abolitionists. For example, because of the comparison of white and black slaves, white workers tried to avoid being associated with African-Americans and bigoted slurs started appearing in the American language. Suddenly, workers who were not preforming well were called “white niggers,” and described as “working like a nigger.”(343) This shows, I think, how linking the wage system battle to slavery hurt the American society and the abolitionist movement in the long run; especially considering that these slurs were still used in America during the Jim-Crow years after the civil war.
In comparison, Ashworth does a better job at looking at the bigger picture. As he quotes Charles Sumner coining a phrase to refer to southern slavery as “labor without wages,” Ashworth shows us that some individuals were trying to point out the injustice in coupling both issues. Sumner was trying to illustrate to his readers that the slave system was more oppressive than the wage system and that the issues were not remotely on the same level. Ashworth asserts that Lincoln realized the underlying issues in both white and black slavery, and rather than trying to solve both together, “Lincoln emphasized social mobility.” (354) Lincoln believed that the “American greatness” could be attributed to the fact that “every man can make himself” in the U.S.
Ashworth describes Lincoln as someone who fought for “equal privileges in the race of life,” and not someone who would fight against the apparent wage slave oppression. Lincoln believed this labor system was part of what made America great; that it contributed to the “American dream” ideal. Ashworth concludes that Lincoln’s fundamental change in American Politics was based on the idea of social mobility, the freedom of each individual to make a life for himself, and the “relationship between the employer and employee.” According to Ashworth, this relationship is “now hailed as a quintessential characteristic of a “free” society. There it remains today.” (357) Rather than attempting to define and solve the wage crisis as Roediger tries to, Ashworth proves to us with Lincoln’s example that the issues were separate and should have been treated as such.