NOTHING BUT FREEDOM: Emancipation and Its Legacy

by Eric Foner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 1983

The post-emancipation condition of former slaves was for long almost as harsh as slavery, and Columbia U. historian Foner (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Politics and Ideology in the Age of Civil War) explains why. In a brief survey (the text is from a lecture series), he looks at the post-emancipation societies of 19th-century Haiti and the British islands of the Caribbean--documenting the process by which plantation economies adapted to emancipation while retaining, in a different form, the thoroughly dominated labor force such an economy requires. In Haiti, for example, the slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture first took a conciliatory stance toward the former slave masters, since Toussaint believed that a strong plantation economy was necessary for Haitian independence and prosperity. To prevent former slaves from abandoning the plantations, laws were promulgated imposing military discipline on the labor force and annulling land sales to former field hands. Succeeding leaders attacked the plantation owners, but left the labor laws intact as the state took over the plantations. In the British territories, the shrinkage of the former slave labor force that resulted from subsistence farming led to the importation of Indian and other laborers. Everywhere, except Haiti (where the former slave owners were expropriated), the conflict between slaves and masters was resumed between laborers and plantation owners. In the American South, a distinguishing feature was the emergence of sharecropping, which gave black farmers a measure of independence. Sharecropping was the outcome of a battle between blacks, who used their emancipation as a political wedge, and planters who tried to limit black access to land; and it helped prevent the emergence of a pure wage system of southern rural labor. Foner's concluding chapter looks at the condition of free labor in the South, focusing on a series of strikes on South Carolina rice plantations, where he unfolds the different forces at work on a local level. Foner covers this complicated story well on all levels in all locales, from British Guiana to the Georgia Sea Islands--making a good introduction to new thinking about slavery, and its aftermath.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1983

ISBN: 0807132896

Page Count: -

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION