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“The emancipated slaves own nothing,” remarked former Confederate General Robert V. Richardson a few months after the end of the Civil War, “because nothing but freedom has been given to them.”
Nothing But Freedom probes the aftermath of emancipation in the South, the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw a rapid transition from slavery to the creation of an almost totally dependent, powerless work force; and early twentieth-century southern and eastern Africa, where a self-sufficient peasantry was dispossessed in order to create a dependent black work force.
Emancipation in the American South was unique in that the freedmen were immediately given a measure of political power under the policies of Reconstruction. As a result, the state governments became an important battlefield in the confrontation between former master and former slave. In the Caribbean, the planter-dominated government assured the survival of the plantation system by severely limiting the economic opportunities available to blacks and by inhibiting the growth of peasant agriculture. Without political power, the freedmen in the Caribbean were unable to challenge the laws that kept them in a position of economic dependence. In the South, the political leverage and legal rights of the former slaves allowed them to escape, to some degree, from the economic domination of the planters—to take the first steps toward gaining control over their own freedom.
Many scholars, Foner finds, have lost sight of the essential radicalism of Reconstruction. Measuring the progress of freedmen in the post-Civil War South against that of freedmen in other recently emancipated societies, Nothing But Freedom reveals Reconstruction to have been, despite its failings, a unique and dramatic experiment in interracial democracy in the aftermath of slavery.
Eric Foner is professor of history at Columbia University. He is the author of Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War; Nat Turner; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; and Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War.
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