 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we're here today to talk about reconstruction in the North. This is not usually the subject. When people say reconstruction, they think about the South. The South was devastated economically, physical destruction, social upheaval, new politics. That didn't happen in the North nearly as much. But what happened in the North was a new social order. Social orders are characterized in many ways, and one is by the nature of social conflict. Now, there are different ways of looking at social conflict. One can look at it objectively. Here's a group of people. They have a common interest. There's another group of people with a different common interest. Those two groups come together in conflict. That's an objective view of social conflict. It's also not very useful because everybody has multiple interests. You could have these interests in common in different ways. You could have interests against each other in different ways. They're always cross-cutting interests. I mean, I share an interest with Dan over there in promoting UMass. We have conflicting interests since he works for me and my department as a wage earner. We have common interests because we want this video only to go well. We have common interests as Americans, residents of Massachusetts. We have conflicting interests since I'm close to retirement age and he's just starting out. Which interests matter? What really determines the nature of group conflict, class conflict in a society is not any objective sense, but the subjective sense that people develop built around an ideology of how the world works and how it's structured. Dan and I share a common ideology that what really matters is, do you live in Western Massachusetts or do you live someplace else? If you live in Western Massachusetts, then you are good and worthy and deserving of huge subsidies from the government and the world is unfair because we don't get these subsidies. That should be paid for by people in Texas or wherever. People in Texas have a different subjective interest that the whole world should bow down to them, especially Mexico. I don't know. It's subjective sense. Now where do people get these subjective senses? In the United States, by the end of the 1850s, northerners were increasingly rallying around a subjective sense that free labor was good and the slaveocracy was out to get them. So the enemy of all good northerners were the slave owners in the South who were out to extend slavery to the whole country and oppress all northerners. And northerners, wage earners and capitalists were united by this vision of things where the key divide in society was over slave ownership and support for slave ownership. If that's the key divide, then all northerners, capitalists and wage earners are together. That's the coalition that carried Lincoln to power, the free soil, free labor, free men coalition. And that's the coalition that fought the Civil War. And one, whether it was Grant, Sherman, or Thaddeus Stevens, the radical abolitionists in Congress. They were all united around free labor. Okay, Civil War's over, slavery's gone, what's next? Right away we start getting modern forms of class conflict in the United States. On the workers side, the workers want to carry forward the labor reform side of abolition. The abolition for much of the American working class was about fighting all forms of slavery, whether in Georgia or in Lowell. The abolitionists in Massachusetts and the Liberty Party campaigned for the 10 hour day and then after the Civil War, the 8 hour day. And Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips, radical abolitionists and radical Republicans went immediately smoothly from campaigning against slavery to campaigning on behalf of the working people of the North. If slavery in the South is bad, slavery in the North is bad. Wage slavery is just as bad and we need to have more leisure time, higher wages, etc. as part of the campaign against wage slavery that continues the campaign against abolition. This was the origin of American labor radicalism. Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist, ran for governor of Massachusetts in 1869 on the labor reform ticket, campaigning for the 8 hour day, which was to become a 6 hour day, campaigning for trade unions, campaigning for collective ownership of property, the whole thing. How do capitalists respond to this? Do they just lie down and say, well these are our allies, these are our friends in the Free Labor Coalition? No. They reinterpret free labor in a different way, in a way that's consistent with their desire to protect their property. For them, slavery was bad because it interferes with the rights of individuals over their property. A slave produces property and a slave's property should be protected. That's what free labor is about. The same way they argue, the free worker has property in his labor, he can buy and sell his labor wherever he wants. And to interfere with his freedom through government or union regulations is to put him in slavery. So the same vision where slavery is the enemy is carried forward to both the capitalist and the labor camps. For labor, slavery is bad, therefore workers should have more control over the means of production and should have more leisure time and higher wages. For capitalist slavery is bad, therefore workers should not be restricted in their right to contract, their right to make any sort of contract, including these bizarre contracts. So the Supreme Court overturns regulations requiring the payment of wages in honest money, in legal currency. No, if a worker wants to have a contract where he's going to be paid in company script, maybe a dumb idea, but we're not going to interfere with that because the worker has the right to make whatever contract he wants, anything else is a form of slavery. Laws restricting the hours of work overturned because they interfere with the right of contract and they treat the worker as a slave. Laws restricting wages, minimum wage laws overturned because if a worker wants to make a contract for a lower wage, that's his right as a freeman, anything else a form of slavery. Union regulations requiring that you join a union if you work in a place of form of slavery because they're requiring that you join in an organization. So anti-slavery becomes the ideological fuel for two contending social classes and the conflict between the working class and capitalists is to dominate American society for the century after the Civil War. Reconstruction in the North has implications just as great for the next century as does reconstruction in the South and we'll talk some more about that next time. Thank you very much and have a nice day. Bye bye.