I love reading history, and presently at my bedside is Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, by Eric Foner. We may have heard a lot about the civil war: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, then some stuff happened ..... But we are terribly ignorant about Reconstruction, the period after emancipation. Foner emphasizes, for one thing, that slaves were very much protagonists: as the Union Army moved through the South, slaves fled their masters and plantations well in advance, and many slaves joined the union army. People organized to demand land and services. Some abolitionists and government officials supported the slaves, others pressured them to return to their former masters as wage laborers and sharecroppers. Large amounts of confiscated land was given to the freedman, only to be taken back, as the North tried to win back some of the Southern gentry. The right to vote was not passed by the US Congress, after much resistance North and South, until 1967.
Both freedman (ex-slaves) and poor white farmers pressed to get land--land to be taken from the wealthy secessionists, the plantation masters. In one instance in Georgia, freedman and poor whites found common cause. This quote is from a petition by poor white farmers demanding land:
Appropriate out of the vast amount of the surplus lands of the wealthy, a comfortable home for the helpless and dependent black man whose arduous labor for the last two hundred years justly entitles him to such inheritance... We believe the freedman is just entitled to a home out of the lands of the secession party who tried to dissolve the Union in order to perpetuate slavery as the children of Israel were to the promised land.
While the wealthy schemed to perpetuate the plantation system by different means including convict leasing, freedman pressed for the right to be individual contractors, and have the law protect them when landlords failed to pay them. In South Carolina--which had the highest percentage of black people in a state--one freedman proposed a bill to regulate the profits of merchants and allow laborers to "meet and fix by ballot the rate of wages which their employer shall pay them." Hmmm ... sounds like an idea whose time has come.
