Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Agricultural reconstruction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The idea suggested itself of cutting the plantation up into numerous small farms, or rather patches…. It is no matter of surprise that this temptation proved irresistible. Every negro who procured one of these patches, saw himself at once in the light of an independent planter, placed upon an equal footing with his former master, and, looking into the future, beheld in himself a landed proprietor.
A. R. Lightfoot, “Condition and Wants of the Cotton Raising States,” De Bow's Review 6 (February 1869), p. 153.In an agricultural society the possession of land is the key to affluence, the source of economic security, and the basis of an estate to be passed on to one's children. Surrounded by an agrarian economy, the ex-slave felt that his economic independence required the acquisition of land. The Reverend Garrison Frazier, a Negro spokesman for a group of freedmen, at a meeting in Savannah told General Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton in 1864: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn in and till it by our own labor…. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own. ” Whitelaw Reid related a conversation with an old man of sixty: “What'se of being free if you do n't own land enough to be buried in? Might juss as well stay slave all yo'days.”
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- Information
- One Kind of FreedomThe Economic Consequences of Emancipation, pp. 81 - 105Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001