A Short Q&A with the Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power Contributors
Today’s interview is with Stuart MacKay, a member of the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
1. Tell us about your essay, “The Promise of Free Labor: Carl Schurz and Republican Conceptions of Labor within the Early Reconstruction South.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, many northerners saw in a defeated South an opportunity to build a free labor society out of the ruins of society built on enslaved labor. One of those northerners was a German Republican named Carl Schurz, who was asked by President Andrew Johnson in 1865 to survey social conditions in the postwar South. However, the labor conditions which Schurz found there challenged his belief that a free labor system in the South could be created organically, into one where political action would be necessary to implement it.
2. What sparked your interest in labor history?
Traditionally, I’ve always seen myself as a political historian. But in examining the Republican party during the Civil War era, I’ve discovered that one cannot separate the political message of “free soil, free labor, free men” with what that slogan actually meant on a practical and fundamental level. It was easy for Republican spokesmen to extoll the virtues and value of free labor on the stump, but few had any idea how to actually implement it in the South. By incorporating the methodological elements of labor history into my own research, I hope to understand how political rhetoric was transformed into political action.
3. Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
I’ve often been struck at how media and policy-makers today view still view labor without contemplating race and gender. Witness the multitude of articles about the forgotten working class of America which still views it as being composed of mainly white men who work in manufacturing. The reality in American today is the working class are increasingly African American/Hispanic, female, and work in the service industry. Yet somehow they are not considered the prototypical working class. Furthermore, in an era when politicians of all political stripes still extoll the values of “pulling oneself up by their bootstraps,” while simultaneously avoiding dealing with the socioeconomic obstacles that prevent many people from doing so, it’s important to remember there’s a long historical tradition of politicians doing this. By examining how labor was defined historically, both by occupation and by race/gender, it allows us to better comprehend the current issues facing the working class in the present.
4. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently finishing my dissertation, which examines the creation of the Republican party in the Border South states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. I’m looking at how various antislavery leaders attempted to build a Republican organization in these slave states before the war, and how the war transformed the ideological direction of Border South Republicanism as party leaders grappled with unionism, emancipation, reconciliation, and civil rights.