American exceptionalism, American anxiety: wages, competition, and degraded labor in the Antebellum United States

Abstract

American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States. By Jonathan A. Glickstein. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Pp. x, 361. Cloth, $39.50.)American economic exceptionalism, that historical concept tied closely to the availability of land and westward development, was a myth. In truth, the late antebellum northern United States was more clearly defined by anxiety-driven negative work incentives. So argues the author of American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States. In this exploration of antebellum American labor ideologies, Jonathan A. Glickstein offers an intellectual examination of nineteenth-century perceptions of free labor and draws some unconventional conclusions. Avoiding the usual quantitative data, tables, and charts detailing the economic progress of real wages that usually furnish the toolboxes of economists and economic historians, Glickstein concentrates on how nineteenth-century Americans perceived wage labor. Although his dense prose makes the book a difficult read, even for labor specialists, he offers a valuable alternative to standard assumptions about free labor.Drawing on the written record of contemporary commentators on northern society, mostly its elites, Glickstein seeks to demonstrate that the positive work incentives in the antebellum era, which closely associate high wages with increased productivity, do not tell the entire story of wage labor in the United States before the Civil War. Engaging the standard historiography of the market revolution, whiteness studies, and works concerned with bourgeois ideological hegemony, the author uncovers important disagreements about the perceptions of the roles of positive and negative work incentives. he is concerned with what observers of the changing labor system in antebellum America believed to be happening in their world. What did contemporaries define as the strengths and weaknesses of the evolving free labor market? Were workers more motivated by economic opportunities and upward mobility or by the fear of poverty and inability to feed their families? In seven chapters, Glickstein uses antebellum northerners' observations to establish a less familiar reality that seriously calls into question the myth of American exceptionalism.At the heart of the book is the notion that the ideal of American exceptionalism, which celebrated the ability of northern workers to benefit from the commodification of their own labor, does not tell the whole story of free labor in the late antebellum era. Although many workers could (and did) benefit from positive work incentives such as upward mobility, others were more likely to be influenced by negative factors, including the fear of poverty and starvation. Glickstein argues that historical debate has too long focused on the dichotomy between a free labor North and a slave labor South. The antebellum South was not the only region in the country where workers lived in fear, he contends; northern laborers were just as likely as the enslaved to be motivated by negative incentives, if not the direct fear of the lash. …