After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South ed. by Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly (review)

The Reconstruction era retains its resiliency as a scholarly subject in this volume of essays edited by Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly. The book is a result of two international conferences and funded by the After Slavery Project, a research association comprising scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays exemplify some of the great work featured at both conferences. The book’s goal is to draw attention to recent interpretational shifts that emphasize the “disparity between promise and lived experience” immediately following emancipation (5). Following in the footsteps of Eric Foner and Steven Hahn, After Slavery provides proof that the Reconstruction period still remains a rich reservoir for inquiry and scholarship.

Thomas Holt’s essay sets the tone for the book by urging historians to rethink emancipation in light of the contradictions between the concepts of freedom and citizenship. Holt links several vignettes, from a slave revolt on the French colony of Guadeloupe in 1793 to the liberation of sweatshop workers in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, and argues that the very “concept of freedom has a history” (22). For Holt, the emancipation experiences in the western hemisphere over the past two hundred years can offer insight into current dilemmas as well as a new synthesis for reinterpreting the promise and reality of emancipation in the 1860s.

The book’s best feature is its emphasis on a growing view among Reconstruction scholars that emancipation was an uncertainty for the entire nation and not just the formerly enslaved. In his essay on the conflicting views of black laborers and the party leadership in the South Carolina Republican Party, Brian Kelly deftly states that for freedpeople “freedom encompassed both political equality and economic transformation” (204). Such a view countered the northern Republican free-labor ideology that was bereft of any larger labor reform beyond the abolition of slavery. Meanwhile, most white southerners fought, often violently, to maintain control of their labor force and racial order. The conflicting agendas of freedpeople, white northerners, and white southerners are apparent in every essay. After Slavery pushes Reconstruction scholarship beyond a southern centric approach and complements recent works, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s West from Appomattox, in placing Reconstruction within the larger narratives of American history.

In what is perhaps the best example of how uncertainty influenced events, Gregory Downs urges a reexamination of the current Reconstruction narrative with a more realistic view that political enfranchisement and rights by themselves do not alter a society. Downs argues that the failure of Reconstruction resided in the North’s incomprehension of how to effectively occupy the South and reorder southern society. Reconstruction, according to Downs, never had a chance because of the immediate demobilization of the Union army in the months following Appomattox. Downs provides several examples of Freedmen’s Bureau agents in North Carolina being left helpless because of a lack of manpower and funds. The hesitation of the federal government toward instituting a lengthy and costly occupation of the South highlighted the inability and unwillingness of northerners to undertake the necessary measures to effectively alter southern society. Furthermore, the North was unable to envision the amount of work necessary to create a free labor system in the South because, as Downs writes, the North failed to understand that free labor was “not naturally occurring” and needed “to be planted, nurtured, and guarded” (117).

After Slavery is an excellent collection of essays that cover a variety of different experiences during Reconstruction. That diversity of experiences, from the motivations of Klan members in Alabama to the difficulties faced by freedpeople in Kentucky, provides the reader with a general idea of the problems present in the nation immediately following the war. Moreover, the potential of Reconstruction is evident throughout the book. The uncertainty, bitterness, and hope for the future of the...