This is a book about the interaction between law, labor, and society in the early republic, that period of American history beginning in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution and extending through the mid-nineteenth century. It is a book for people interested in legal and labor history, but it is also intended as a demonstration of how research undertaken under the auspices of those disciplines can inform the broad stream of American political and social history. It is a book, then, which seeks an audience with American historians at large.

My most substantive concern in undertaking the research that has produced this book has been to provide a detailed analysis of developments during the early republic in the three areas of law that had the clearest and most direct impact on the lives of working people at work. These were the law of criminal conspiracy, under which both journeymen and factory operatives were tried and convicted for combining against their employers; the law of master and servant, under which the relations of parties to employment contracts were construed to be relations of domination and subordination; and the several common law rules which immunized employers from liability to their employees for accidental injuries occurring in the course of employment.