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Emancipations and Reversals: Labor, Race, and the Boundaries of American Freedom in the Age of Capital

Review products

EngermanStanley L., Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom: Comparative Perspectives (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
JungMoon-Ho, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006).
O'DonovanSusan Eva, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2009

Brian Kelly
Brian Kelly
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 169 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2009

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References

NOTES

1. I am referring to the Gutman-Hill debate. See Gutman, Herbert G., “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and Letters of Richard L. Davis and Something of their Meaning,” in Jacobsen, Julius, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement (New York: 1968): 49–127Google Scholar.; “Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,” Journal of Culture, Politics and Society 2 (Winter 1988): 132–199.

2. Hahn, Steven, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, 2003), 10Google Scholar.

3. Robinson, Armstead L., “Beyond the Realm of Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History,” Journal of American History 68 (1981), 277CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Du Bois, W.E.B., Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1998 reprint), 353Google Scholar.

5. See Cooper, Frederick, Holt, Thomas C., and Scott, Rebecca J., Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar.

6. O'Donovan, Susan Eva, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, 2007), 9, 5Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, “The Anatomy of Emancipation,” in Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (New York, 1984), 10Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, Miller, Steven F., O'Donovan, Susan E., Rodrigue, John C., and Rowland, Leslie S., eds., Land and Labor, 1865 [Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867—Series 3, Volume 1] (Chapel Hill, 2008)Google Scholar.

7. Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997), 3, 13, 34Google Scholar.

8. A reliable study puts the number of Afro-Cubans killed in the repression that followed the 1912 revolt at “between three and four thousand.” See Graham, Richard, Skidmore, Thomas E., Helg, Aline, Knight, Alan, The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin, 1990), 55Google Scholar.

9. Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 1–10, 15–16, and passim.

10. Rodrigue, John C., Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge, 2001)Google Scholar; Scott, Rebecca J., Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Emancipation (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar. For an insightful but neglected study, see Messner, William F., Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1862–1865 (Lafayette, 1978)Google Scholar.

11. Foner, “Anatomy of Emancipation,” 10.

12. Cooper et al., op. cit., 23.

13. Rebecca J. Scott, “Race, Labor and Collective Action in Louisiana and Cuba, 1862–1912,” in Cooper et al., op. cit., 106. On the 1887 strike see Rodrigue, op. cit., 183–191; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 564–601Google Scholar; and Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 419–421.

14. See Dunning, William A., Essays on the Civil War & Reconstruction (New York, 1904 ed.)Google Scholar; Du Bois, op. cit.; Foner, Reconstruction.

15. Frank, Thomas, “Lie Down for America: How the Republican Party Sows Ruin on the Great Plains,” Harper's Magazine (April 2004): 33–46Google Scholar. See also Frank's, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. Incisive critiques of Frank's argument which also question the usefulness of the red/blue model include D'Amato, Paul, “The Red, the Blue and the Ugly,” International Socialist Review 39 (January 2005)Google Scholar and Larry M. Bartels, “What's the Matter with What's the Matter with Kansas?” Paper Presented to the American Political Science Association, September 2005, available at <http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansas.pdf>.

16. Hillary Clinton interview with USA Today, 7 May 2008, <http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-05-07-clintoninterview_N.htm>.

17. White, Richard H., “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK, 1991), 57–59Google Scholar.

18. Gitlin, Jay, “On the Boundaries of Empire: Connecting the West to Its Imperial Past,” in Cronon, William, Miles, George, and Gitlin, Jay, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York, 1993), 72Google Scholar; Cronon et. al., “Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History,” in Under an Open Sky, 13.

19. Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), 124Google Scholar. On the potential contributions of labor historians in reframing the history of the West, see her chapter entitled “Uncertain Enterprises,” 97–133. For an excellent model of western labor history that combines attention to class relations with sensitivity to the region's complex racial dynamics, see Montejano, David, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin, 1987)Google Scholar. On conflict in mining, see especially Andrews, Thomas G., Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar; White, It's Your Misfortune, 351.

20. Richard H. White, op. cit., 51.

21. T. P. Bailey to Thomas J. McKie, May 12, 1870, Thomas Jefferson McKie Papers, Duke University Special Collections.

22. Vann Woodward, C., Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1951)Google Scholar.

23. Logan, Rayford L., The Negro in American Life and Thought, The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: 1954)Google Scholar, republished in an expanded edition as The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1965).

24. W.E.B. Du Bois places the issue in proper perspective when he remarks that failure of the federal government to carry out meaningful land reform did not “stop the individual efforts of exceptional and lucky Negroes to get hold of land….” In the South Carolina lowcountry, where demographic conditions favored black landholding in the post-Redemption era, one study notes that in 1884 “the private property held by an average black household might consist of one horse, a mule or a cow, and household goods. The working stock was numerous though of a very inferior quality and there was seldom any shelter for the animals.” See Du Bois, op. cit., 603–604; Gelston, Arthur Lewis, “Radical Versus Straight-Out in Post-Reconstruction Beaufort County,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 75 (1974), 227Google Scholar.

25. Washington used the term, or similar formulations, frequently in expressing his disagreement with Reconstruction policy. See, for example, Chapter V in his Up from Slavery, and see also “Colored Men Advance,” an article he penned for the New York Herald, October 20, 1895, in Harlan, Louis R. ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, v. 4 (Urbana, 1972), 62Google Scholar.

26. On the general situation facing black Southerners, see Meier, August, Negro Thought in American, 1880–1915 (Ann Arbor, 1966), 19–82Google Scholar, and Litwack, Leon, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. In recent years historians have developed a large literature on the convict lease system. The best overall account remains Lichtenstein's, AlexTwice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, but see also Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York, 2008)Google Scholar.

27. Richardson, Heather Cox, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, 2001), 5Google Scholar. See my review in Journal of International Labor and Working Class History 64 (Fall 2003). For my own thoughts on Washington and his relationship with the black working class, see Kelly, , “Industrial Sentinels Confront the ‘Rabid Faction’: Black Elites, Black Workers, and the Labor Question in the Jim Crow South,” in Arnesen, Eric, ed., The Black Worker: A Reader (Urbana, 2007), 94–121Google Scholar.