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25 U. Pa. J. Const. L. Online 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/jclon25 and id is 1 raw text is: DUTY TO CONTRACT: FREE LABOR IDEOLOGY AND CONTRACTUAL FREEDOM IN THE POSTBELLUM SOUTH, 1865-1867. Janice Yingzhuang,jiang* INTRODUCTION Of the many questions raised by emancipation, wrote historian Eric Foner in his magnum opus, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, none was more crucial to the future place of both blacks and whites in Southern society than how the region's economy would henceforth be organized.1 Few would dispute that the official abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment brought an end to the Southern economy based primarily on slave labor, but the more difficult question is what a Southern economy based on free labor would entail. The natural first step of this transition was to replace a system of private ownership of humans with an impersonal system of bargained-for agreements. Indeed, contract ostensibly reconciled free choice and social order, and epitomized the principle that legitimate systems of authority must rest upon consent rather than coercion.2 This essay explores the ways in which the right to contract interacted with the free labor ideology at this pivotal moment in American legal history. It examines this relationship by looking at the perspectives of four groups of historical actors: grassroots actors such as anti-slavery activists and ordinary laborers, legislatures of the former Confederate states, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau,s and federal lawmakers in the 39th Congress. This essay argues that, although Congress legislated some of the key grassroots demands on a system of free labor and the right to contract through constitutional amendments and federal statutes, enforcement by the Freedmen's Bureau Research Editor, Volume 25, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law; J.D. Candidate, 2023, University of Pennsylvania Law School; B.A., History and International Relations, 2019, Mount Holyoke College. Thank you to the editors of the University of PennsylvaniaJournal of Constitutional Law Online for invaluable editing and comments. 1 ERIC FONER, RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION, 1863-1877 at 50 (1988). 2 Id. at 164. 3 The agency was formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.