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

by Julie Saville

• ISBN13: 9780521566254
• ISBN10: 0521566258
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-04-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

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

Notes

Bibliography.