Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Free Wage Labor in the History of the West
- PART ONE AMERICAN CONTRACT LABOR AND ENGLISH WAGE LABOR: THE USES OF PECUNIARY AND NONPECUNIARY PRESSURE
- PART TWO “FREE” AND “UNFREE” LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
- 8 “Involuntary Servitude” in American Fundamental Law
- 9 Labor Contract Enforcement in the American North
- Conclusion
- Index
8 - “Involuntary Servitude” in American Fundamental Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Free Wage Labor in the History of the West
- PART ONE AMERICAN CONTRACT LABOR AND ENGLISH WAGE LABOR: THE USES OF PECUNIARY AND NONPECUNIARY PRESSURE
- PART TWO “FREE” AND “UNFREE” LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
- 8 “Involuntary Servitude” in American Fundamental Law
- 9 Labor Contract Enforcement in the American North
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
The question of the use and legality of penal sanctions to enforce labor contracts in the United States is a complicated one. Before the mid-eighteenth century, statutes in a number of American colonies subjected “hired” as well as imported workers to penal sanctions for breaches of their labor contracts. Over the course of the eighteenth century these provisions began to disappear from the colonial codes, leaving immigrant indentured servants as the only adult white contractual labor still subject to penal sanctions. The reasons for the disappearance of penal sanctions to enforce the contracts of hired workers remain unknown. Whatever explanations may be developed, however, must simultaneously account not only for the disappearance of these remedies in the case of hired labor but also for their continued use in the case of imported labor.
By 1800 wage work in the United States was different than it was in England, at least for adult white native-born workers. The agreements of these wage workers could not be enforced through penal sanctions or specific performance. However, penal sanctions to enforce the contracts of imported indentured servants continued to be legal and to be used in the United States until the 1830s. Significant numbers of servants were imported, on and off depending on international conditions, until about 1820. During the following decade fewer and fewer servants were imported; around 1830 the last ones entered the United States. By the later 1830s all had completed their service. Thereafter, the treatment accorded to European workers imported into the United States under contracts was brought into line with the treatment long accorded to American wage workers. By the late 1830s, neither the agreements of adult white American wage workers nor those of adult imported European contract laborers were enforced through penal sanctions or specific performance.
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- Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century , pp. 253 - 289Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001