The Work of Reconstruction

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. In the labor disputes that convulsed the post-Civil War South can be read former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom. This book examines social, political, and cultural conflicts opened by the abolition of slavery and the fashioning of wage relations in the era of the American Civil War. It offers a new, close look at the origins, goals, and tactics of popular political clubs created by emancipated workers in the countryside of one of the Deep South's oldest plantation states. The Work of Reconstruction draws on a rich documentary record that allowed ex-slaves to 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 liberty.