During the 1840s and 1850s, leaders throughout the North and West emphasized a set of ideas that seemed to explain why the changes under way in their society benefited some people more than others. They referred again and again to the advantages of what they termed free labor. (The word free referred to laborers who were not slaves. It did not mean laborers who worked for nothing.) By the 1850s, free-labor ideas described a social and economic ideal that accounted for both the successes and the shortcomings of the economy and society taking shape in the North and West.

Spokesmen for the free-labor ideal celebrated hard work, self-reliance, and independence. They proclaimed that the door to success was open not just to those who inherited wealth or status but also to self-made men such as Abraham Lincoln. Free labor, Lincoln argued, was “the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” Free labor permitted farmers and artisans to enjoy the products of their own labor, and it also benefited wageworkers. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,” Lincoln asserted, “labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Wage labor, Lincoln claimed, was the first rung on the ladder toward self-employment and eventually hiring others.

The free-labor ideal affirmed an egalitarian vision of human potential. Lincoln and other spokesmen stressed the importance of universal education to permit “heads and hands [to] cooperate as friends.” Throughout the North and West, communities supported public schools to make the rudiments of learning available to young children. In rural areas, where the labor of children was more difficult to spare, schools typically enrolled no more than half the school-age children. One farm woman recalled, “I had no books in my house we didn’t think about books—papers—We worked—had to live.” When available, textbooks and teachers—most of whom were young women—drummed into students the lessons of the free-labor system: self-reliance, discipline, and, above all else, hard work. “Remember that all the ignorance, degradation, and misery in the world is the result of indolence and vice,” one textbook intoned. Both in and outside school, free-labor ideology emphasized labor as much as freedom.