Slavery, Liberty, and the Right to Contract

19 N EV . L.J. 447, Z IETLOW

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NEVADA LAW JOURNAL

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tract. 223 The influence of that view can be seen in the efforts of Freedmen’s Bu reau officials to establish a system of free labor in the early Reconstruction Era. 224 Those officials used the formal right to contract as a model as they sought to establish a system of free labor. 225 However, the dissents in Slaugh terhouse articulate only one strand of free labor ideology from the antebellum and Reconstruction Era. 226 As we have seen, other antislavery activists viewed liberty of contract more broadly, not as defining free labor, but as a means to achieve free labor. 227 From Tom Paine to Abraham Lincoln, “freedom entailed ownership of productive property.” 228 For freed slaves who could not afford property, and wage workers of all races, freedom of contract came to mean the right to be free of undue coercion in the workplace. 229 With the Thirteenth Amendment, the Reconstruction Congress embraced this view by abolishing not only slavery, but also involuntary servitude. 230 Enforcing that Amendment, that Congress regulated workers’ right to contract to establish a system of free labor. In Slaughterhouse , an opinion written by Lincoln appointee Justice Samuel Miller, the Court rejected the argument that the Reconstruction Amendments protected the butcher’s r ight to practice their trade and upheld regulations that have been imposed by the Reconstruction government. 231 While Justice Mil ler’s opinion in Slaughterhouse has been justly criticized by numerous scholars for its narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth A mendment’s Privile ges or Im munities Clause, 232 the ultimate ruling upholding a health and safety regulation was consistent with the views of the vast majority of the Reconstruction Con gress that legislatures could regulate the right to contract. Like Justice Miller, a majority of the Reconstruction Congress embraced regulation and rejected a formalist right to contract.

B. Freedmen’s Bureaus and the Formalist Right to Contract

In 1865, the pressing question for the Reconstruction Congress was how to establish a system of free labor for the newly freed slaves that would be free of undue coercion. 233 In the south, employers and employees had to adjust to their

223 See Forbath, supra note 12, at 786 (acknowledging that the right to freely sell one’s labor was indeed the core of the abolitionist “utopian constitutionalism.”). 224 N IEMAN , supra note 203, at 158. 225 Id. 226 See Forbath, supra note 12, at 768. 227 See supra notes 62 – 69 and accompanying text. 228 Forbath, supra note 12, at 769. 229 See id. at 802. 230 U.S. C ONST . amend. XIII. 231 See The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36, 57, 80 – 81 (1872). 232 See Richard L. Aynes, On Misreading John Bingham and the Fourteenth Amendment , 103 Y ALE L.J. 57, 63, 99 – 100 (1993). 233 F ONER , supra note 62, at 99.