The 19th Century Americans experienced the collision between the Republican values and the wage labor system. As labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky points out, it was the question of “how could a republican democracy built on the participation of economically independent freeholders and artisans endure in a society composed in the main of dependent wage earners?” It was also the question of how the Republican order could be maintained in the capitalist system which failed to share its benefits equally on labor citizens. The laborers who claimed to contribute to the American Revolution and the building of the Republican nation asked for their fair share. But what they encountered was the harsh reality that culminated the gap between the Republican ideals and the wage labor system that degraded them to be subjects of their own masters. Therefore the criticism of the labor republicans was centered on the wage labor system, which the critics called as the wage slavery. The critics of the wage labor denigrated the ‘wage system’ as the main obstacle to what they thought of as their birthright: freedom, independence, and democratic citizenship. They believed that wages and republicanism were on a collision course, with wage labor destroying the possibility of democratic government. They begun to indict an emergent industrial order by affirming the significance of the nation’s political commitment to independent citizenship. Workers’ rejection of wage labor drew from notions of freedom, independence, and citizenship, which interconnected areas of politics, society, and economics. In the political arena, workers thought that equality was possible only if each member of the polity was economically independent. In the guise of the voluntary contract they perceived a compulsion that they believed made it impossible to exercise citizenship. The critics tried to escape from the wage slavery through the change of the power imbalance with employers. They sought to strengthen heir position through education, organization, cooperation, and political influence , and most of all, to enable them to share in the gains and honors of advancing civilization. The labor republicans of the 19th century failed to implement their believes in the American system. The labor movement which have survived mostly focused on the practical goals with the rules of the capitalist system and did not touch the fundamental question of the wage labor as did the labor republicans. However, in considering today’s economic inequality which becomes severe than ever, it is important to remind and reexamine the arguments of the labor republicans that the wage should not be determined wholly by the market but intervened by the social considerations in order to give back the labor citizens their rights to live freely and equally.