"Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations" by Amy Dru Stanley

"Unlike chattel slavery..., the commodification of free labor long had posed a problem in Anglo-American traditions of thought. At least a century before Thomas Jefferson famously derided manufactures in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia, wage labor had been associated with the hierarchies of the household and carried the stigma of dependence." ("Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations", Amy Dru Stanley, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 279-288)

n the era of the American Founders, "Hirelings- no matter how voluntarily they put up their labor for sale or what the price they were paid- were considered not fully free. To be sure, the cash nexus, contract, and the play of the free market in labor eroded the personal relations of dominion and submission characteristic of the customary bonds of paternalism between the gentry and laboring people." ("Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations", Amy Dru Stanley, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 279-288)

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, plain folk, patricians, political theorists, and members of Parliament joined in expressing "hostility to the status of wage-labourer," according to Christopher Hill's classic study of the subject. For the hireling had lost his birthright, "that property in a man's own labour and person," which was the badge of a free man." ("Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations", Amy Dru Stanley, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 279-288)