This dissertation is a cultural investigation of the meaning of freedom in America from Emancipation to the early twentieth century. Since 1776, a liberal discourse of rights has framed what freedom means in the national consciousness. Defined as an inalienable right legitimated by an infallible authority, freedom was made the basis upon which subjectivity is recognized, governments are formed, appeals are made, and revolutions retain the allure of transformative possibility. However, this idea of freedom obscures the ways in which problems with legitimacy, authority, and the sociopolitical construction of subjecthood all impact the meaning of being free in America. These problems are most apparent concerning the nation’s racial politics. The lives of black Americans have exposed the aporia between the ideal of freedom and the reality of racialized existence. The dissonance between the freedom praised as America's most valued ideal and the experience black Americans lived allows for a way of reading the coming of freedom as problem—as a collection of discrepancies, contradictions, and scenes for the violation and subjection of black people. In this project, I read emancipation and the passing of the Reconstruction Amendments as narrative and performative events. By doing so, the freedoms extended to black Americans post-Civil War are neither bestowed by law or the radical ideals of Lincoln as emancipator or the Republican Congress, nor do black Americans initiate their own meaning of freedom of their own accord. In this moment of transition, the meaning of freedom was determined by both those in political power and those whose practices sought to negotiate the conditions in which they lived. However, as the meaning of freedom was shaped in this moment, it would be insufficient to address the problems of racial logic that restricted what freedom could mean for not only black Americans but the national body at large. This project is an attempt to trouble what we know about freedom as it regards emancipation, abolition, citizenship, and enfranchisement. It is a project that criticizes the narrative of victory around freedom in this moment and considers the ways in which the freedom celebrated in a national historical consciousness has been the very source of the problem in determining what it means to be free in America.

Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almost every aspect of America's society and economy, including fire regulations, inspection and licensing rules, fair marketplace laws, the moral policing of prostitution and drunkenness, and health and sanitary codes. Based on a reading of more than one thousand court cases in addition to the leading legal and political texts of the nineteenth century, The People's Welfare demonstrates the deep roots of regulation in America and offers a startling reinterpretation of the history of American governance.

The eminent legal scholar James Willard Hurst's sociological analysis of the relation between law and private business in relation to society at large Hurst argues that law and business support the same goals of efficiency and humanity, and examines their interrelationship toward that end in terms of ethical issues related to public policy, money supply, the impact of incremental change, inflation and deflation, monopoly and competition, and other economic factors. Based on Hurst's lectures at The University of Wisconsin in April, 1981. James Willard Hurst [1910-1997] is widely recognized as the father of modern American legal history. He taught at University of Wisconsin Law School. A prolific scholar and writer, Hurst's major works include The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (1950), Law and The Conditions of Freedom in The Nineteenth-century United States (1956), Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Wisconsin Lumber Industry 1835-1916 (1964), Law and Social Process in U.S. History (1960) and Law and Social Order in the United States (1977). CONTENTS Introduction: The Market, the Law, and Challenges of Scarcity Chapter 1 Law and the Constitution of the Market Chapter 2 The Market in Social Context Chapter 3 Bargaining through Law and through Markets Notes Sources Cited Index