ABSTRACT
Preeminent among the rights that belonged to freedom were “rights of family and rights of contract.” So Charles Sumner declared to the United States Senate in the course of a very long and learned disquisition on the legal status of emancipated slaves in December 1865. Sumner gave due regard to rights of property, suffrage, and equality before the law. But the defining difference between freedom and bondage, he maintained, was freedom of contract: the right to marry and have a family, and the right to sell one's labor for a wage. Like most others of his generation, Sumner took for granted that relations of marriage and wage labor were complementary. 1
