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Reconstruction brought into sharp focus two related problems of political economy left over from antebellum America. In a nation founded on an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency, ownership of land had become concentrated in too few hands, prompting complaints about a "land monopoly" from the 1840s onwards. As if this were not already enough of a problem, the Civil War emancipated roughly four million slaves, adding to the ranks of the landless. The second problem was the status of wage laborers. From the perspective of ‘free labor’ advocates, there was nothing inherently wrong with wage labor so long as it was a stage on the way to economic independence. But by the 1840s, if not earlier, there was clearly a growing class of Americans who could never hope to achieve economic independence and would spend their lives working for someone else, and the Civil War greatly accelerated this trend. The nation found itself faced with the problem of how to accommodate the ideals of republicanism with this reality.
What had held these problems and contradictions at bay was free labor ideology. This ideology saw American prosperity as being based on the widespread holding of productive property as the result of hard work in a free marketplace. In some senses, before the Civil War, free labor ideology never really had to prove itself; the existence of the 'Slave Power' of the South was an obstacle that always lay in the way of the millennial unfolding of the harmonious society envisioned by the evangelists of the free labor ideology. With emancipation, however, that obstacle, and that excuse, was removed. Reconstruction was to be the proving ground to see whether free labor ideology could actually work in practice, and the key was the ability of freedpeople to become peasant proprietors within the agricultural economy of the South.
if it did not change the fact that freedpeople were mostly landless and destitute?
Library of Congress
Sources:
Document 1. Rufus B. Saxton Argues that Land Should be Set Aside for Freedpeople
Document 2. Freedmen’s Bureau Report on the Treatment of Plantation Laborers in Gates County, North Carolina
Document 3. A Freedpeople's Colony on Roanoke Island, North Carolina
Document 4. Rufus B. Saxton’s Letter to Northern Planter Edward S. Philbrick
Document 5. General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15
Document 6. Freedpeople React to the Restoration of Land to their Former Masters
Document 7. Planter-Attorney William Whaley Wants to Exclude Blacks from the Land Board
Document 8. South Carolina’s ‘Black Code’
Document 9. A Desperate North Carolina Republican Appeals to Governor Holden for Land
Document 10. White Confederate Veterans Appeal to South Carolina's Land Commission
Document 11. A Freedpeople’s ‘Co-operative’ in Colleton County, South Carolina
