MacKay’s essay, “The Promise of Free Labor: Carl Schurz and Republican Conceptions of Labor within the Early Reconstruction South,” examines how in the aftermath of the American Civil War, many northerners saw in a defeated South an opportunity to build a free labor society out of the ruins of society built on enslaved labor. One of those northerners was a German Republican named Carl Schurz, who was asked by President Andrew Johnson in 1865 to survey social conditions in the postwar South. However, the labor conditions which Schurz found in the South challenged his belief that a free labor system in the region could be created organically, into one where political action would be necessary to implement it.
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