In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

≤ Living by Themselves Slaves’ and Freedmen’s Hunting, Fishing, and Gardening in the Mississippi Delta The story of Yankee mill girls’ venture from New England farms to urban factories demonstrates the importance of both place and work in shaping people’s relationship with the natural world. Yet theirs is not the only story. Examining other regions and sectors of the American economy in the same period or at di√erent times complicates the historical narrative. Former slaves in the Mississippi Delta, for example, who cultivated the cotton used in textile mills, stayed much closer to home, near the rural plantations where they were born and raised and worked for much of their lives, yet they also witnessed a significant transformation in their labor and social relations. Capitalism came to the countryside as well as the cities, and the economic and social change it wrought was not entirely a process of linear declension. In the Delta, the focus of this chapter, slaves obviously benefited from emancipation, but their experience is, of course, more complicated than that. In bondage and in freedom, black men and women resisted exploitation by a myriad of means, and that resistance impeded somewhat not only their abuse as laborers but also estrangement from their work and environment. When field hands and sharecroppers engaged in various forms of independent production , namely a combination of hunting, fishing, and gardening that was relatively outside the control of a master or landowner, they avoided to a limited extent the dual alienation that Karl Marx was just then beginning to understand and explain. It was not always clear to outside observers, however, what exactly was happening. In 1867, reporting from his subdistrict headquarters in the Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula, Mississippi, Freedmen’s Bureau o≈cer George Corliss bemoaned the local freedpeople’s seemingly underdeveloped work ethic. Many of them ‘‘are industrious and frugal,’’ he explained, ‘‘while others are inexcusably idle and slothful, some of the latter manage to exist by fishing, 36 Slaves and Freedmen hunting, &c.’’ Corliss claimed, for the most part wrongly, that the men and women just released from bondage were ‘‘usually satisfactorily paid’’ by their employers, often their former masters, and he believed that grievances about wages were rarely an excuse for a lack of work discipline and respect for labor contracts. In his general frustration, blinded by a belief in ‘‘free labor’’ and hindered by racism, he misunderstood the situation. Some freedpeople did fail to follow through on their new commitments to work white planters’ fields, but it was typically not because they were lazy or slothful.∞ One of the things the Pascagoula case demonstrates is the way prevailing social relations conditioned blacks’ interaction with the environment. This had been true when they cultivated cotton, sugarcane, rice, and indigo as chattel, and it remained so when they worked those crops for a wage or share after the Civil War.≤ But viewing independent production as a form of resistance to exploitation—a way of contesting slavery, wage labor, and white supremacy—also reveals links between labor and race relations and African Americans’ relationship to nature. Through hunting, fishing, and gardening, black men, in particular, often sought and found supplements to family subsistence , freedom from oversight and physical abuse, as well as opportunities for asserting their masculinity. They bargained for access or stealthily escaped to a di√erent part of the natural landscape, to use it in ways at odds with how they labored in fields for slave-owning planters or profit-minded, postbellum landowners.≥ slavery By necessity this chapter casts a wide net for sources that speak to slaves’ and freedpeople’s experience with the natural world, the varying ways in which they used it as well as their thoughts about it. But the primary geographical focus is on the Mississippi Delta. Over the course of the nineteenth century this area, land that originally sustained the Choctaw, was transformed from a ‘‘wilderness’’ into a critical part of the Cotton Kingdom. When white migrants and black slaves first moved into the Delta in the 1820s pressure increased for Indian removal, and the federal government made several treaties with native residents toward that end. By 1832 aspiring planters had acquired unhindered access to territory along the Mississippi River, stretching from Hinds County in the south to Tunica County in the north. During the antebellum period most plantations were confined to this strip along the waterway , silt-laden land that was more easily cleared than what could...

Share