A fundamental shift was transforming the economy: the rise of wage labor. As structural changes in the economy forced workers to accept wage labor not as a temporary state but a permanent condition, they resisted. Free labor depended on independence, and, as Lincoln had said, permanent wage labor signified “either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune,” but as the 1860s turned into the 1870s wage labor was becoming not a transitory stage in life but the norm.
