When Americans of different social groups in the early-mid nineteenth century moved beyond the minimum criterion of "free" labor, that of the worker's legal self- ownership, and discussed what they meant by dignified, "truly free" manual labor, they brought a wide variety of criteria to bear on the subject. The focus of this dissertation is upon the meanings, including in some cases the moral and mental rewards, which middle class intellectuals, labor reformers, politicians, journalists, capitalists, and manual laborers themselves invested in the intrinsic nature of various forms of hand work.

Those meanings were in considerable measure a complex amalgam of major intellectual traditions, notably ones deriving from the Old Testament, classical Greek philosophy, evangelical religion, and classical economic thought. Beliefs about free labor's intrinsic character were also tied to perceptions of black chattel slavery in the South and various forms of "pauper" labor in contemporary Europe; free labor values generally were embedded in the enormous Anglo-American Victorian literature on poverty, mass education, family structure, and working class unrest. But the concentration upon antebellum perceptions of manual labor's intrinsic and distinctive rewards and pains has resulted in one particular, overall emphasis throughout this study: the centuries-old division between mental and manual labor and the differential esteem and material rewards which attended this division. In part because of its inherent characteristics, in part because of the influence of venerable intellectual and cultural traditions attesting to those characteristics, some if not all of the most socially necessary manual labor in the free states, as in the South and the Old World, was commonly disdained in word just as it was avoided, whenever possible, in practice. Ways in which industrial capitalism and newer forms of work, above all factory labor, reinforced this fundamental historical circumstance in the early-mid nineteenth century are explored in the dissertation. Much discussion, too, is given to the various arguments utilized to justify or rationalize the allocation of the most disagreeable labor to stigmatized or relatively powerless groups--enslaved and free blacks, immigrants, and women.