Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America by Brian Luskey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America by Brian Luskey Jonah Estess Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America. By Brian Luskey. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 304 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95.) Does war haunt even those who profit from it? Brian Luskey's Men Is Cheap pushes Civil War studies even further afield from origins debates by exploring the relationships among war, labor markets, and market ideology in Civil War America. In fact, Men Is Cheap combines the historiographic turn toward capitalism with Civil War studies. It details the inner workings of substitute soldier recruitment as a symptom of the economic conditions from which the Civil War emerged and of the Union Army's own labor demands. Luskey argues that individuals possessing capital saw war as an opportunity to profit off what amounted to "human trafficking in the name of wage labor and free capital" (6). Luskey opens with the premise that the Civil War and American capitalism were mutually constitutive, each one a driving force that expanded the exploitative boundaries of the other. Labor brokers opened and operated intelligence offices, speculating on the recruitment value of potential substitutes for those who could pay their way out "of killing and dying" (2). Paradoxically, however, Luskey observes that "coerced people were . . . a most valuable currency that made capital free" (9). A war fought to abolish the institution of slavery nullified promises of a free-labor ideology and made the labor recruitment system one that Americans could neither escape nor fully embrace. Ideas, institutions, and economic events such as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 serve as the backdrop for each chapter's central focus on the people who became and interacted with Civil War labor brokers. Chapter one follows Thomas Webster Jr., a speculator, merchant, middleman, and hopeful beneficiary of the existing patronage system, as he and many others were driven to seek profit off an impending need for soldiering labor. (Webster appears sporadically throughout the whole book.) The secession crisis drove "economic dislocation," which chapter two argues led down-on-their-luck Northerners to reluctantly accept labor recruitment as an alternative career path and money-making opportunity to patronage jobs (45). The remaining five chapters comprise the bulk of Luskey's argument. Chapter three explores the relationship between enlistment and capitalist culture. Chapter four dives into the fraudulent practices of labor brokers and President Lincoln's attempts to alleviate frustration with fraud. Chapter [End Page 100] five explores army officials' efforts to make labor coercion, particularly directed at African American soldiers, socially acceptable in the national interest. Finally, chapter six details the Union's push in 1864 to coerce growing numbers of Southern refugees into crushing the slave aristocracy that still clung to the Confederacy. Men Is Cheap is both a well-researched historiographic contribution and a timely arrival on historians' bookshelves. Luskey's deft interpretations of visual culture sources—twenty in all, most from Vanity Fair—are replies to continued calls for creative interpretations of Civil War political economy. Additionally, the consequence of divisions among historians about how to write social histories of the Civil War (2) pale in comparison to how the wider public thinks of class and the Civil War. Films such as Glory, The Gangs of New York, and Lincoln occupy prime real estate in public memory. As timely as ever, Luskey presents historians with tools to begin reshaping public memory of America's only civil war as the United States reckons with capitalism's troubling influence on America's longest war. [End Page 101] Jonah Estess American University Copyright © 2022 Historical Society of Pennsylvania