Freedom: Volume 3, Series 1: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labour: The Lower South
A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867

This 1991 volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Lower South.

Ira Berlin (Edited by), Thavolia Glymph (Edited by), Steven F. Miller (Edited by), Joseph P. Reidy (Edited by), Leslie S. Rowland (Edited by), Julie Saville (Edited by)

9781107405783, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 July 2012

976 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 1.4 kg

"...represents another milestone in the Freedmen and Southern Society project....[T]his volume brings the series to its halfway point and makes another contribution to the study of American labor and social history. Like other volumes in this series, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South should be applauded by scholars and students of labor and working-class history in national and international perspective....illuminates heretofore-obscure dimensions of one of the most complex and far-reaching social changes in American and African-American history: the initial transformation of slaves into a new working class." Joe W. Trotter, International Labor and Working-Class History

Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom, first published in 1991, presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored 'contraband camps', as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and, in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors' interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor - former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Editorial method
Symbols and abbreviations
1. Low country South Carolina, Georgia and Florida
2. Southern Louisiana
3. The Mississippi Valley
Index.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]