Politics & Power Quote by Charles E. Merrill

The line lands like a velvet-gloved ultimatum: you want them gone, fine - but you do not get to keep their labor on the cheap. Merrill frames the conflict as a simple matter of contract, yet every word is doing cultural work. By naming "republican laborers", he signals that the real issue is not productivity but politics - the plantation as a controlled social ecosystem where dissenting allegiances are treated like contamination. The sentence turns that instinct against itself: if ideology is the excuse, then legality is the weapon.

"Plantation" is the loaded noun here. Even in the late 19th and early 20th century, it drags the afterlife of slavery into any discussion of wages and mobility. Merrill is leveraging that resonance without sermonizing. He implies a moral hierarchy: whatever your preferences, you still owe people what you promised. The subtext is sharper: employers who posture as masters of their property often rely on a quieter form of coercion - debt, withheld pay, or contractual fine print - to keep workers from exercising real choice.

The intent reads as both practical and disciplinary. Merrill is not romanticizing labor; he is insisting on the exit door as a right purchased by full payment. That is a distinctly capitalist rebuke to quasi-feudal management: if you want a pliable workforce, do not launder control through contracts you refuse to honor. Pay up, and the "problem" solves itself - revealing that the true fear is not Republicans, but free workers who can afford to walk.