Papers presented by Ann Daly since 2019
2025 Atlanta, Georgia
"The Kings: How Freedom Became Coercion for the Family that Built the American South’s Bridges "
Ann Daly, University of South Florida, Tampa
Abstract:
This paper uses the King family to examine the relationship between expert labor, slavery, and freedom in the antebellum US South. Born enslaved, Horace King, his mother, Susan, and siblings Washington and Clarissa designed and built bridges across every major river in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. As the cotton frontier continued to move west, enslavers wanted the government to build roads and bridges to help get cotton to market. States and municipalities responded by borrowing money to build infrastructure. Bridge building required significant expertise; Horace and Washington personally designed bridges, milled lumber, and supervised crews in remote areas—a set of abilities that few others possessed. The particularities of slavery’s legal regimes combined with the political economy of bridge construction—the experience needed and the enormous amount of debt required—shaped how the King’s enslavers approached appropriating the family’s labor. On one hand, King’s enslaver’s legal ownership of King himself gave him the legal right to claim ownership of King’s expertise and build a business around the family. On the other hand, King’s legal commodification as fungible property meant that his enslaver could also lose control of King’s knowledge to his creditors. In 1846, the King family’s enslaver, John Goodwin, faced bankruptcy. Caught between legal institutions that allowed him to possess or lose King, he freed Horace but not the rest of the Kings, to keep him from creditors’ reach. The state had a vested interest in controlling King’s knowledge; government borrowers needed tolls from completed bridges to pay their bonds, and they risked defaulting if Goodwin lost access to King’s expertise. With the Alabama legislature’s assistance, Goodwin freed Horace and relied on his continued ownership of King’s mother and siblings to coerce King into continuing to build bridges. Commodifying knowledge by commodifying people could bolster or threaten enslavers’ businesses. When control of enslaved expertise came under threat, one enslaver subverted the line between slavery and freedom, turning manumission into a form of coercion.
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"Free and Enslaved Women’s Labor at the Early US Mint"
Ann Daly, Mississippi State University
Abstract:
In the early nineteenth-century United States, new forms of wage work led Americans to devalue women’s domestic work, arguing that only productive, public, and male workers contributed to markets. Historians have long argued that these gendered valuations of labor were historical phenomena to question the distinction between productive and reproductive labor. This paper builds on scholarship on capitalist markets’ reliance on female and household labor to argue that women’s work was instrumental to making money itself. Using payrolls, census records, notarial records, architectural floorplans, and government correspondence, this paper reconstructs women’s work at and on behalf of the US Mint in the first half of the nineteenth century to argue that the institution’s workforce defied discursive distinctions between domestic and industrial labor. In addition to an industrial workforce of white, wage-earning men and women performing tasks traditionally associated with factory labor, the Mint relied on women doing work more often associated with households. In Philadelphia, outwork seamstresses sewed protective equipment for the institution at home. Likewise, mandates that officials live in the Mint meant that the buildings were also domestic spaces where enslaved and free women cooked, cleaned, and cared for children, all under the government’s purview. Labor performed by practically the full spectrum of working women found in the Early Republic, from wage-earning factory workers and outwork seamstresses to enslaved laundresses and slave-owning white women, converged in the making of a coin. Money defied divisions between home and work and production and reproduction from the moment it was made.
2021 Hopin Virtual Events Platform
"The Independent Treasury, William M. Gouge, and Federal Currency Reform in the Antebellum US"
Ann Daly, Brown University
Abstract:
Historians often remember antebellum political economist William Gouge for his supposedly laissez-faire ideology; his runaway best-seller, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking; and role as the architect of hard-money thought. His two-decade-long career as a Treasury official is generally overlooked, but in the 1840s and 1850s, Gouge presided over a complete reorientation of federal currency oversight. This paper explores Gouge’s Treasury career to offer a new interpretation of federal financial regulation and hard money policy from the 1830s to the 1850s. Using Gouge’s papers and drawing on new theories of money and banking born out of critical legal studies and modern monetary theory, this paper reconstructs the operations of the new Treasury department Gouge designed and ran in the 1840s, known as the Independent Treasury. It argues that the IT was an expansive but overlooked regulatory agency, through which antebellum hard money advocates radically expanded the federal government’s regulatory power over money and credit in the aftermath of the Second Bank of the United States’ destruction.