The work of Reconstruction : from slave to wage laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870

In their efforts to achieve freedom, ex-slaves mounted a dual struggle to elude the personal domination of the old order and to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of emerging wage employment. This book draws on a rich documentary record to allow ex-slaves to express in their own words and behavior the aspirations that underlay their efforts. The author discusses the labor disputes that convulsed the post-Civil War South, in which can be read former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom. With the abolition of slavery in the American South, the largest slave population in the hemisphere gained independence from institutional powers that had absorbed its social being into masters' and mistresses' households. Ex-slaves seized emancipation as the occasion to reclaim their persons and their labor, precipitating a social movement that linked immediate relations, family, kinship, community, labor-sharing, and mutual aid to arenas of political action. This book explores from the vantage of the South Carolina countryside the upheavals in daily life that underlay broad social transformations engendered by emancipation and the fashioning of wage relations. Going beyond current discussions about the meaning of freedom for former slaves, it offers a portrait of freedpeople's actual social life that sheds light on their new relations with yeomen Republican allies. Ex-slave's projects of "grass-roots reconstruction" were a dual struggle to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of postbellum employment, and to elude the personal domination of the old order. Freedmen and -women gradually mounted public and collective repudiations of the reasoning that had supported their owners' rights to command human property. At the same time, they challenged emergent claims that subjection to landowners' management and to the discipline of an abstract market constituted freedom. The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record, in which ex-slaves express in their own words and behavior the aspirations and goals that underlay their efforts. Not satisfied to render freed men and women as objects of theoretical inquiry, this book vividly recovers the concrete practices and language in which ex-slaves achieved freedom and the expectations that they had of liberation.