Foner3_LectureCH15.ppt - Chapter 15"What Is Freedom...

Chapter 15
"What Is Freedom?":
Reconstruction, 1865–1877

The Meaning of Freedom
 Blacks and the Meaning of Freedom

Negative Freedom vs Positive Freedom

Land Ownership

Civil Rights
 Freedom Contested/Contradictory

The Meaning of Freedom

Families in Freedom

Sought loved ones separated by sales and purchase

Wives, children, parents

Strengthen familial bonds

Recognize marriages

Pensions by Black soldiers sought- economic security

Adoption of existing American family structure

Men place in the workplace

Women and children at home

Poverty
 Church and School

Independent churches

Baptist and Methodist Churches grew rapidly in the Post War period

Central to black life, providing educational, social and political spaces

Improvement through education

Sought the ability to read religious and political literature

First Black Colleges founded

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Winslow Homer’s 1876 painting

The Meaning of Freedom
 Political Freedom

The Right to vote.

Free association in Public sphere.

Organizing political groups and candidates.

Celebration of 4
th
of July.
 Land, Labor, and Freedom

Ownership.

Economic life.

Meaning of Freedom – Open ended process of
liberation vs. Birthright.

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
Map 15.1 The Barrow Plantation

The Meaning of Freedom
 Masters without Slaves

Many Plantation owners had to work land themselves
for the first time in their lives.

Sought to preserve the political and social dominance
of plantation society, in spite of the absence of slaves.

Preserve Hierarchy and mastery
 The Free Labor Vision

Imposition of free wage labor in the South.

Expectation that freed Blacks would become wage
workers and landowners.

Agrarian vs Industrial Society.

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The Great Labor Question from a Southern
Point of View

The Meaning of Freedom

The Freedmen’s Bureau

Established by Congress March 1865

Free labor system

Establish schools, give aid to poor and elderly, solve disputes

Ensure equal treatment under law for both former slaves and
White Unionists
 The Failure of Land Reform

Believed that sound race relations rested on fair wages

Freed people wanted land, not wage work

US troops forcibly evicted black who had been given land by
Union forces

Rural former slaves stayed poor and property-less

Forced into menial and unskilled labor

Give Me Liberty!: An American history, 3rd Edition
Copyright © 2011 W.W. Norton & Company
The Freedmen’s Bureau, an engraving from
Harper’s Weekly

The Meaning of Freedom

Toward a New South

Task system survived in South Carolina and Georgia.