The triumph of contract freedom rested as much on discrediting proslavery visions of free market society as it did on destroying the slave system. As northerners dismantled southern society and addressed the momentous problems of Reconstruction, they simultaneously had to confront crises within their own world that had been forecast by slavery's defenders. In the slaveholders’ view, freedom would ultimately bring the end of all domestic order: organic relations of dependency – between master and slave, husband and wife, the propertied and unpropertied – would give way to the cruel hierarchies of free market relations. That was the lesson of history, one southerner had warned the United States Congress in 1857. “When the working classes stepped out of the condition of bondage, by the process of emancipation, they branched into four recurring subordinations – the hireling, the beggar, the thief, and the prostitute.”

More than any of the other figures, the prostitute evoked the nightmare of freedom envisioned in the Old South. She stood outside the matrix of the legitimate contracts of labor and of marriage. Yet by exchanging sex as a commodity for money she perversely fused aspects of both, in a way contemporaries found loathsome. Above all, they were haunted by the figure of the streetwalker. In both law and popular thought, she was equated with the beggar, classified as a dependent vagabond who did nothing valuable and bothered passersby. Yet her defining trait was not asking for alms but offering to sell her body. Unlike the beggar, she complied with the spirit of the market.