Emancipation In Virginia S Tobacco Belt 1850 1870

An important contribution to the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, this book reveals the crucial and remarkably varied roles that African-Americans in Virginia's tobacco belt played in the momentous changes wrought by the transition from slavery to freedom. The state with the largest number of slaves on the eve of the Civil War, Virginia had undergone a peculiar set of economic developments that made its black population, both enslaved and free, especially diverse. A significant minority had made contact, typically through slave hiring, with a form of wage labor; still others had engaged in independent production and exchange. Because they shared their experiences with the slave majority who remained on the plantations and farms, hired slaves and independent producers helped create a nascent antebellum market culture, which in turn both undermined and buttressed slavery, laid the foundation for Confederate defeat, and influenced the introduction of free labor in the immediate postemancipation period. Basing her study on extensive research in letters, family papers, and public documents, Lynda J. Morgan traces the complexities of the story from the prewar decade, when Virginia's plantation heartland served as a hired slave-labor reserve for its eastern industry and private households; through secession and the Civil War, when Virginia Confederates failed to adapt African-American labor to their wartime purposes; and, finally, to emancipation and its aftermath, when freed slaves in the tobacco belt infused, with varying degrees of success, their previous knowledge and experience into the state's postwar economy, which was moving toward unbridled capitalist development. Morgan demonstrates that by marketing their labor many former slaves successfully imposed some of their preindustrial notions of property and work upon the new pattern. Thus, freed slaves in the Virginia tobacco belt were often able to adapt to postwar conditions more rapidly than their counterparts in the Cotton South. As Morgan notes, many other historical studies of emancipation have pivoted on the question of whether the Civil War and the elimination of slavery fundamentally altered the character of southern society. While stressing that these events were in fact nothing short of revolutionary, Morgan's study suggests that elements of continuity were also vitally important. The result is a nuanced view of the postwar South and of the nature of slavery and the culture it produced.

Though deeply entrenched in antebellum life, the artisans who lived and worked in Petersburg, Virginia, in the 1800s -- including carpenters, blacksmiths, coach makers, bakers, and other skilled craftsmen -- helped transform their planter-centered agricultural community into one of the most industrialized cities in the Upper South. These mechanics, as the artisans called themselves, successfully lobbied for new railroad lines and other amenities they needed to open their factories and shops, and turned a town whose livelihood once depended almost entirely on tobacco exports into a bustling modern city. In Artisan Workers in the Upper South, L. Diane Barnes closely examines the relationships between Petersburg's skilled white, free black, and slave mechanics and the roles they played in southern Virginia's emerging market economy. Barnes demonstrates that, despite studies that emphasize the backwardness of southern development, modern industry and the institution of slavery proved quite compatible in the Upper South. Petersburg joined the industrialized world in part because of the town's proximity to northern cities and resources, but it succeeded because its citizens capitalized on their uniquely southern resource: slaves. Petersburg artisans realized quickly that owning slaves could increase the profitability of their businesses, and these artisans -- including some free African Americans -- entered the master class when they could. Slave-owning mechanics, both white and black, gained wealth and status in society, and they soon joined an emerging middle class. Not all mechanics could afford slaves, however, and those who could not struggled to survive in the new economy. Forced to work as journeymen and face the unpleasant reality of permanent wage labor, the poorer mechanics often resented their inability to prosper like their fellow artisans. These differing levels of success, Barnes shows, created a sharp class divide that rivaled the racial divide in the artisan community. Unlike their northern counterparts, who united as a political force and organized strikes to effect change, artisans in the Upper South did not rise up in protest against the prevailing social order. Skilled white mechanics championed free manual labor -- a common refrain of northern artisans -- but they carefully limited the term "free" to whites and simultaneously sought alliances with slaveholding planters. Even those artisans who didn't own slaves, Barnes explains, rarely criticized the wealthy planters, who not only employed and traded with artisans, but also controlled both state and local politics. Planters, too, guarded against disparaging free labor too loudly, and their silence, together with that of the mechanics, helped maintain the precariously balanced social structure. Artisan Workers in the Upper South rejects the notion of the antebellum South as a semifeudal planter-centered political economy and provides abundant evidence that some areas of the South embraced industrial capitalism and economic modernity as readily as communities in the North.

The only comprehensive bibliography on Reconstruction, this book provides the definitive guide to literature published from 1877 to 1998. In over 2,900 entries, the work covers a broad range of topics including politics, agriculture, labor, religion, education, race relations, law, family, gender studies, and local history. It encompasses the years of the Civil War through the conclusion of the 1876 election and the end of the federal government's official role in reforming the postwar South and protecting the rights of Black citizens. In detailed annotations, the book covers a range of literature from scholarly and popular studies to published memoirs, letters and documents, as well as reference sources and teaching tools. The issues of Reconstruction—civil rights, states' rights and federal-state relations, racism, nationalism, government aid to individuals—continue to be relevant today, and the literature on Reconstruction is large. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive bibliographic guide to that literature. It is organized by topics and geographical regions and states, thereby emphasizing the local diversity in the South. In addition to a variety of literature, it covers the relevant Supreme Court cases through 1883, provides full citations to federal acts and cases cited, and includes the texts of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The book will be useful to scholars and students researching a wide range of topics in Southern history, constitutional history, and national politics in post Civil War United States.

A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil War Features contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarship Covers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory

A Companion to the U.S. Civil War presents a comprehensive historiographical collection of essays covering all major military, political, social, and economic aspects of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Represents the most comprehensive coverage available relating to all aspects of the U.S. Civil War Features contributions from dozens of experts in Civil War scholarship Covers major campaigns and battles, and military and political figures, as well as non-military aspects of the conflict such as gender, emancipation, literature, ethnicity, slavery, and memory

The South has been largely overlooked in the debates prompted by the wave of welfare reforms during the 1990s. This book helps correct that imbalance. Using Richmond, Virginia, as an example, Elna C. Green looks at issues and trends related to two centuries of relief for the needy and dependent in the urban South. Throughout, she links her findings to the larger narrative of welfare history in the United States. She ties social-welfare policy in the South to other southern histories, showing how each period left its own mark on policies and their implementation--from colonial poor laws to homes for children orphaned in the Civil War to the New Deal's public works projects. Green also covers the South's ongoing urbanization and industrialization, the selective application of social services along racial and gender lines, debates over the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, the professionalization of social work, and the lasting effects of New Deal money and regulations on the region. This groundbreaking study sheds light on a variety of key public and private welfare issues--in history and in the present, and in terms of welfare recipients and providers.

Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of their agricultural enterprises. In the wake of the Civil War, however, the abolition of slavery, combined with changed market conditions, sparked a breakdown of traditional tobacco culture. Focusing on the transformation of social relations between former slaves and former masters, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie traces the trajectory of this breakdown from the advent of emancipation to the stirrings of African American migration at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing upon a rich array of sources, Kerr-Ritchie situates the struggles of newly freed people within the shifting parameters of an older slave world, examines the prolonged agricultural depression and structural transformation the tobacco economy underwent between the 1870s and 1890s, and surveys the effects of these various changes on former masters as well as former slaves. While the number of older freedpeople who owned small parcels of land increased phenomenally during this period, he notes, so too did the number of freedom's younger generation who deserted the region's farms and plantations for Virginia's towns and cities. Both these processes contributed to the gradual transformation of the tobacco region in particular and the state in general.

The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation