Slave emancipation ended the contradictory coexistence of freedom and slavery in the American republic. But a central paradox of emancipation was nullifying the buying and selling of chattel slaves while consecrating the market as a model of social relations among free persons. For Americans who came of age in the postbellum era, the problem was distinguishing between what was saleable and what was not. That problem reflected the concurrence of abolition in the South and burgeoning industrial capitalism in the North, and was grounded in changing circumstances of wage labor and home life on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. At stake were matters of property, political economy, law, and morals. This book studies how a generation who argued over the meaning of slavery and emancipation drew on contract to describe the changes in their world and to distinguish between the commodity relations of freedom and bondage.

This is a study, then, of contract as a worldview. That worldview idealized ownership of self and voluntary exchange between individuals who were formally equal and free. It had roots in ancient notions of covenant, but its modern origins lay in Enlightenment traditions of liberal thought. Through the lens of contract many Americans conceptualized the transition from slavery to freedom and pondered the ambiguities of a culture that deplored the traffic in slaves while pushing nearly all else to sale in the free market. Most interested in these issues were freed slaves and Yankee hirelings, statesmen and feminists, and all kinds of moral reformers and social scientific thinkers.