Implicit in the ethos of contract that denied a man food unless he worked was the assumption that his wages ought to be at least enough to keep him from starving. But this primal reciprocity was hardly thought to constitute free labor's hallmark; for even slavery, as abolitionists admitted, involved the exchange of labor for sustenance. Despite classical political economy's grim lessons of supply and demand, which taught that the free market inevitably put hirelings at risk of starving, the moral legitimacy of wage labor in the era of slave emancipation rested on the promise that free commodity relations would afford more than slavery's equities – more than brute survival. But how much more? By what measure did the wage contract distinguish free men from chattel property?

That question was intently debated by a multitude of economists, moralists, and reformers from the early nineteenth century onward. In America as in the Old World, they offered an array of technical definitions and arithmetical formulas as they pondered the equities of the wage contract. Yet nearly all Americans came to agree on one measure of exchange value – that home life differentiated the wages of freedom and bondage. Speaking on behalf of the former slaves to a New York audience in November 1865, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher gave voice to this free labor gospel. “The slave is a man and he will respond to human influence. Although a black man may never be a Yankee, he will follow hard after.