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Klappentext With the abolition of slavery in the American South, the largest slave population in the hemisphere gained independence from institutional powers that had absorbed its social being into masters' and mistresses' households. Ex-slaves seized emancipation as the occasion to reclaim their persons and their labor, precipitating a social movement that linked immediate relations, family, kinship, community, labor-sharing, and mutual aid to arenas of political action. This book explores from the vantage of the South Carolina countryside the upheavals in daily life that underlay broad social transformations engendered by emancipation and the fashioning of wage relations. Going beyond current discussions about the meaning of freedom for former slaves, it offers a portrait of freedpeople's actual social life that sheds light on their new relations with yeomen Republican allies. Ex-slave's projects of "grass-roots reconstruction" were a dual struggle to blunt new coercions embedded in terms of postbellum employment, and to elude the personal domination of the old order. Freedmen and -women gradually mounted public and collective repudiations of the reasoning that had supported their owners' rights to command human property. At the same time, they challenged emergent claims that subjection to landowners' management and to the discipline of an abstract market constituted freedom. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis 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....
