The Work of Reconstruction
From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860–1870

The author uncovers former slaves' critiques of both Southern slavery and Northern freedom.

Julie Saville (Author)

9780521566254, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 April 1996

240 pages, 4 b/w illus. 1 map
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.327 kg

"What sets this book apart in the Reconstruction field is its primary focus on rural black workers and the processes between them and landowners. Deeply rooted in primary sources...Saville's labour history of emacipation...is usually convincing, consistently engaging, and uncoomonly valuable." John T. O'Brien, Labour/Le Travail

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.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations used in notes
A note on spellings
Maps
Introduction
Part I. Freedom Versus Freedom: Competing Visions of Emancipation: 1. Antebellum field slaves' labor: regional overviews
2. Twilight of slavery, dawn of freedom
3. Rebels and 'rebels in disguise'
Part II. A Measure of Freedom: Plantation Workers and the Wartime Introduction of Wage Labor in Port Royal: 4. Eluding the confederacy's grasp
5. Inducing wage labor behind federal lines
6. Wartime planting
7. 'A dollar a task'
8. 'As hard times as they has see with the rebel'
Part III. Restoration and Reaction: The Struggle for Land in the Sherman Reserve
Part IV. The Reconstruction of Work: 9. Remaking family life and labor in the interior
10. Control of the crop
11. Control of supplemental plots
12. Working on shares
13. Holding onto land and time in the low country
14. Uncertain harvests: seasonalization of agricultural employment
Part V. The Work of Reconstruction: 15. Light in August
16. 'Why can't we be friends?'
17. 'There's a meeting here tonight'
18. A perfect system?
19. 'On duty' in the league
20. 'We the laboring men out of doors'
Afterword
Bibliography
Index.

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