1. The AFIC and APD

Over the past few decades, scholars of APD have begun the long-overdue work of accounting for the relationship between racism, capitalism, and the development of the American state. A reckoning with white supremacy and racism has animated calls to recenter the role of racial violence, slavery, segregation, racist policing and incarceration, and Indigenous genocide and dispossession in the narrative of American state development.Footnote ⁷ At the foundation of this racial reckoning within APD is a reconsideration of the origins, significance, and legacy of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. In much of the current scholarship, Reconstruction is characterized, in Du Bois’s famous terms, as a “moment in the sun” and an outlier in the wider trajectory of American state development.Footnote ⁸ According to this view, the Reconstruction state was born of a unique Republican Party coalition of Northern capitalists, abolitionists, and, to a certain degree, Black voters who, however briefly, consolidated state power. This coalition, in turn, pushed through a radical revision of the Constitution in the form of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. However, white Southern resistance and the collapse of the Republican coalition led to the gradual erosion of egalitarian policies and the violent return of white supremacy. In this standard narrative, Reconstruction has emerged as perhaps the quintessential “progress-stagnation-backlash” model of racial and progressive political development.

Much of this narrative is an outcome of APD’s periodization of Reconstruction. In particular, scholars of constitutional development and civil rights often begin their accounts of Reconstruction with the end of the Civil War and the formative political battles between the Johnson administration and Radical Republicans of the 39th Congress.Footnote ⁹ While a postbellum starting point is certainly appropriate for the major legal and constitutional questions over civil rights and federal authority, those interested in questions of governance and the transformation of racial and capitalist relations need to expand their timeline to include wartime Emancipation. Historians have made significant progress in extending the timeline of Reconstruction to encompass the war years (1861–1865). In particular, historians of Emancipation have increasingly shifted their focus from the activities of federal officials, intra-agency conflicts, and the resistance of Southern planters to studies that consider the role of freedpeople in their own Emancipation.Footnote ¹⁰ The wartime liberation of enslaved people, whether by fleeing to federal lines, through military occupation, or simply the flight of planters and overseers, was an extraordinarily contingent, complex, and unprecedented process in American history. The movement of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to freedom and their subsequent supervision by federal officials created enormous pressures on the federal state. Therefore, it stands to reason that Emancipation, like the mobilization of armies and the national economy, produced new demands on the federal government. Emancipation was therefore a state-building process that generated new state institutions and novel uses of state power.Footnote ¹¹ By refocusing on the origins of the Reconstruction state in wartime Emancipation, scholars will gain a clearer understanding of the transformation of state power and the expansion of federal administrative capacity, while also complicating narratives around the racial egalitarianism of Reconstruction.

Such an origin story of the Reconstruction state often begins with the AFIC. The AFIC has been widely understood as the progenitor of the Freedmen’s Bureau and as an important conduit for the transmission of Northern free labor law and ideology to the wartime South.Footnote ¹² For example, in his sweeping history of Reconstruction, Eric Foner simply states that the “Freedmen’s Bureau was the child of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission…”Footnote ¹³ James McPherson’s study of abolitionism during the Civil War, likewise, highlighted the critical role played by the AFIC in that it “laid the foundations for the Freedmen’s Bureau.”Footnote ¹⁴ A similar assessment of the AFIC’s critical importance to eventual post-Emancipation Reconstruction policy can be found in Joseph Reidy’s study of Emancipation, which notes the influence of the AFIC’s reports on both officials in Washington and military officers in the field.Footnote ¹⁵ Herman Belz, in his foundational work on early efforts to secure civil and political rights for freedmen, argues that the AFIC advocated a particularly laissez-faire view of equal rights for freedmen, in contrast to models that demanded greater guardianship and oversight.Footnote ¹⁶ Lastly, more recent work by historians Gregory Downs and Chandra Manning, as well as an edited volume by David Blight and Jim Downs, all draw liberally on the AFIC’s reports and records as indispensable sources for the implementation of wartime Emancipation.Footnote ¹⁷

While the AFIC’s influence is widely acknowledged, the nature of its influence is understudied and too often mischaracterized. In particular, accounts of the AFIC’s significance often fall short on two grounds. First, they present the Commission as an uncritical application of Northern free labor law and ideology to the management of Emancipation. Second, they under-emphasize the impact of the Commissioners’ racial ideology and its impact on both their understanding of Emancipation and their understanding of Black people’s own vision of a post-slavery society. To fully integrate an account of the AFIC into APD, it is necessary to recognize the AFIC’s rearticulation of free labor ideology and its application of free labor policies in the context of the racialized labor and property relationships of the South.

On the first point, it is well known that many of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s labor and land policies, as outlined by the AFIC, reflected free labor ideology and common-law practices of the Northern states. The Bureau’s eventual focus on one-year labor contracts, adjudication of employer-employee relations, and regulation of labor and land markets all had precedents in the North and in aspects of the antebellum Southern economy.Footnote ¹⁸ Exceptional accounts of the development of free labor law form the foundation of APD scholarship, with notable examples including Karen Orren’s Belated Feudalism, Christopher Tomlin’s Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic, and David Montgomery’s Beyond Equality.Footnote ¹⁹ At first glance, the AFIC appears to fit neatly into this free labor ideology, and, as I show in this article, the Commissioners were devoted adherents to the virtues of free labor and market capitalism. Indeed, LaWanda Cox, in her 1958 article on the development of the Freedmen’s Bureau, credits the AFIC with anticipating and influencing the free labor policies pursued by Congress and institutionalized with the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau.Footnote ²⁰ However, when confronted with the realities of the racialized labor regimes of the South and the experiences of wartime Emancipation, the Commissioners found themselves hesitant to uncritically apply free labor principles. Rather, as subsequent sections show, the Commissioners felt that free labor and market capitalist principles would have to be applied in a way that disciplined not just workers and employers, but Black workers and white employers. Understanding the racial and capitalist dynamics of the AFIC’s project complicates the story of the wartime application of free labor policies.

The focus on the challenges presented by the racialized nature of the Southern economy to the AFIC’s project also foregrounds the role of freedpeople in shaping the AFIC’s reports and assessments. The agency of Black workers in resisting and repurposing Northern labor policies in pursuit of greater control over their labor, communities, and protection from racial violence has received some excellent scholarly attention.Footnote ²¹ However, in most cases, scholars have focused on the postbellum activities of Black workers, particularly regarding the Freedmen’s Bureau. Such a focus on the Bureau, rather than on its creator, the AFIC, leads accounts of Reconstruction to miss the role of freedpeople in shaping the foundations of Reconstruction policy. In the context of the AFIC and wartime Emancipation, the activities, demands, and influence of lower-level military and government officials and freedpeople reveal their collective role in shaping post-Emancipation visions of freedom.

Armed with these two new perspectives on the AFIC, this article reframes it not only as a critical institutional predecessor to the Freedmen’s Bureau but also as an influential manager of multiple visions of Emancipation. In the following sections, I reveal how the Commissioners struggled to reconcile several competing visions of Emancipation, each of which had found some expression in wartime federal policy. These multiple visions, as outlined in Table 1, render legible the seeming confusion, contradictions, and, as Foner put it, “tension between the laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the aftermath of emancipation.”Footnote ²² My framework of multiple visions of Emancipation draws inspiration from Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s work on racial institutional orders, particularly their emphasis on how race shapes moments of contestation and transformation.Footnote ²³ However, in contrast to Smith and King’s argument that the “transformative egalitarian” order was ascendant during the Civil War and Reconstruction, this article’s account of the AFIC and its management of multiple visions of Emancipation complicates that “transformative egalitarian” nature of wartime Emancipation. Instead, I show that the AFIC helped inaugurate a racial institutional order that focused more on the management and governance of Black people and racial capitalist relations than it did on the egalitarian transformation of the South. Furthermore, by paying close attention to the AFIC’s complex relationship to the freedpeople it was tasked to aid, the multiple visions of Emancipation model sheds light on a key contradiction at the heart of the AFIC’s views—that the Commission simultaneously advocated for greater equality and rights for freedpeople while at the same time rendering illegible many of freedpeople’s hopes for freedom.

Table 1.

Multiple Visions of Emancipation

Table 1 Long description

Four models of emancipation are compared across ideology, freedpeoples status, the federal governments role, labor and land arrangements, and typical proponents. Two guardianship approaches center white authority: the white supremacist version keeps freedpeople formally free but tightly restricted through state enforcement, coerced labor contracts, debt bondage, and limited land access under white ownership. The white abolitionist guardianship frames control as paternal advisory oversight, with major federal intervention and some land distribution, but still emphasizes supervised wage labor. Managed emancipation under AFIC reflects free labor Republicanism, promoting wage contracts and market production while the federal state supervises labor and land relations and encourages leasing, renting, and regulated land sales with limited direct aid. Freedpeoples visions emphasize full independence, freedom of movement and association, community self-determination, protection from white violence, limits on employer power, and direct demands for land as justice or reparation. Proponents differ accordingly: planters and some officers back the supremacist model, Radical Republicans and aid societies appear in the paternal model, a broad coalition supports managed emancipation, and freedpeoples views are documented widely across the South. The categories summarize stated aims and policies rather than measuring outcomes or how consistently any model was implemented.

2. Race and labor in the AFIC’s ideology

The scholarship on the AFIC focuses heavily on the Commission’s problematic racial ideology and its impact on the Commission’s work and recommendations.Footnote ²⁴ There is good reason for the focus on the Commission’s racial ideology. The AFIC’s reports and fieldwork are awash with racist theorizing about the categorization and hierarchical ordering of racial groups. Indeed, the Commissioners find ways to tie nearly every aspect of Black people’s behavior and character back to some perceived racial feature. In particular, the AFIC’s preoccupation with birth and death rates of mixed-race people, the effect of climate on racial groups, and sexual and familial relations of Black freedpeople have drawn particular scrutiny from scholars.Footnote ²⁵ The frequency and intensity of the Commissioners’ racism and racial theorizing, though dressed up in the language of racialism and white abolitionist paternalism, has led most scholars to conclude that the AFIC’s racial ideology must play a significant role in shaping their reports and recommendations.

What impact did the Commission’s racial ideology have on its vision for a post-Emancipation society? Assessing the influence of the Commissioners’ racial theories on the AFIC’s recommendations is challenging, at least in part, because of the apparent racial egalitarianism of the AFIC’s positions. Despite drawing on racist stereotypes and racial theories to conduct their investigations, the Commissioners focused much of their work on refuting, rather than reinforcing, white anxieties and white supremacist assertions of Black inferiority and incapacity. The challenge of reconciling the Commissioners’ simultaneous commitments to racial hierarchy and equality has led to a confused and contradictory assessment of the AFIC. The first generation of revisionist scholars argued that the AFIC’s racial ideology is best understood as an expression of the white paternalism common among white abolitionists.Footnote ²⁶ Other accounts have taken a more critical view, arguing that the Commissioners’ racial ideology distorted their assessment of the actual conditions and needs of Black people.Footnote ²⁷ However, in both cases, the connections between the Commissioners’ racial ideologies and their policy recommendations remain tenuous. In fact, the impact of the Commissioners’ racial ideology has been so difficult to pin down that, in his study of the AFIC, scholar Oz Frankel argued that the Commission’s racial ideology was “incidental to the commission’s actual recommendations.”Footnote ²⁸

In this section, I find that the AFIC’s racial ideology was neither “incidental” to the Commission’s recommendations nor did it dominate their vision for a post-Emancipation society. Instead, I argue that the Commissioners’ racial ideology is best understood as a constitutive part of their broader belief in the moral and material superiority of free labor and free market capitalism. By tracing the parallel development of the AFIC’s racial and economic ideology, I show that the AFIC’s racial theorizing was nearly always in service of its economic vision.

The ideological origins of the AFIC lay not in the expanding bureaucracy of Secretary Stanton’s War Department, to which it was assigned, but in the meeting halls and print shops of New England abolitionists and social reformers. The movement that led to the Commission’s creation began in September 1862 with the founding of the Emancipation League in response to Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The Emancipation League, headquartered in Boston, was intended to serve as the lobbying arm of the various New England abolitionist societies. The League’s primary goal was to ensure the universalization and permanence of emancipation, and, second, to influence the direction of post-Emancipation federal policy.

In January 1863, the Emancipation League presented the Senate with a petition advocating the establishment of a committee of inquiry to investigate the status and condition of freedpeople under federal protection and to help guide the creation of a “Bureau of Emancipation.”Footnote ²⁹ Beyond the ambition of the League’s policy proposals, the petition was a powerful, clear expression of white abolitionist thought and helped build the rhetorical and ideological framework that welded antebellum abolitionists’ commitments to racial justice and free labor to the wartime expansion of federal state power. The petition stressed the need for an “increase in the administrative departments or the enlargement of their functions” to secure the “reconstruction of southern society on the basis of free labor.”Footnote ³⁰ The petitioners argued that the expansion of federal administrative capacity must be accompanied by the “speedy organization of the emancipated labor” under federal management. Emphasizing the importance of fair pay and treatment for Black workers under federal supervision, the petitioners argued that “such a system, administered in an intelligent spirit of justice and humanity, emancipation is prosperity for the south, progress to the African race, and peace to the republic.”Footnote ³¹ With this tripartite formulation, the petitioners articulated a vision of Emancipation that, at least in the white abolitionist imagination, tied Black people’s liberation to their ability to succeed as free workers under a capitalist system.

Three months later, in March 1863, the Emancipation League’s lobbying bore fruit with the establishment of the AFIC. The three-part program of state expansion, free labor, and racial justice would be directly incorporated into the ideological foundation of the AFIC by Dr Samuel Gridley Howe, a prominent Emancipation League member and coauthor of the petition. Howe was deeply connected to the networks of Boston abolitionists and maintained extensive correspondence with Senator Charles Sumner and Governor John Andrews. In addition to his political connections, Howe had actively participated in the Underground Railroad, opposed the Fugitive Slave Law, and directly funded John Brown’s militant actions.Footnote ³² However, Howe’s most significant contribution to the Commission’s advocacy would prove to be his insistence on grounding federal policy in systematic observation and study. In an often-quoted letter to fellow Emancipation League member F.W. Bird, Howe argues that the League must “collect facts and use them as ammunition.” Howe insists that the federal government’s management of Emancipation must be based on “knowledge of the actual condition of the freedmen.”Footnote ³³ Howe had attempted a trial run of his methods with a survey study he had run in support of the Emancipation League’s petition. Now, backed by the War Department, Howe hoped to use surveys and field visits to bring a sober, bureaucratic rationalism and moral clarity to the process of Emancipation. Howe’s commitment to a rational, systematic, and empirically driven approach to social policy stood in stark contrast to the ephemeral and idiosyncratic nature of military commands or the mercurial character of party politics that had driven federal policy toward freedpeople until then.

Howe was joined by his fellow Commissioners, Robert Dale Owen and Col. James McKaye. Owen was selected to chair the Commission, perhaps in part because of his moderate political background. Although Owen was the son of utopian socialist Robert Owen, he rejected some of his father’s more radical ideas. Instead, Owen’s antebellum political career, as a prominent member of the Indiana legislature, was notable for his position as an idiosyncratic anti-slavery Democrat and social reformer. The third Commissioner, James McKaye, is the least well-known of the three. While he appears to have engaged in antebellum abolitionist activism, his most notable accomplishment before joining the Commission was publishing a pro-Union and pro-Emancipation pamphlet.Footnote ³⁴ All told, the three Commissioners were representative of the kind of Northern reformers dedicated to the destruction of slavery, the reunification of the United States, and the establishment of a national free labor economy.

Within weeks of the AFIC’s establishment, all three Commissioners began field research. To maximize their limited budget and time, the three Commissioners split up to conduct the field studies. Owen and Howe remained largely confined to areas of federal occupation near Washington, D.C., and to the coastal regions of Virginia and North Carolina, which had been liberated early in the war. McKaye, by contrast, traveled to the South Carolina Sea Islands and parts of Florida.Footnote ³⁵ This vanguard of freedpeople, along with the white military officials charged with their supervision and care, would be the primary subjects of the AFIC’s initial studies. In interviewing these federal officials and refugees, the AFIC’s chief objectives were to document the condition of the refugees, assess freedpeople’s willingness and ability to contribute to the war effort, and, most critically in the Commission’s view, determine whether a racially integrated free labor economy could be established in a post-slavery South.

AFIC’s priorities and objectives shaped the questions in the hundreds of interviews and surveys recorded by the Commissioners. Although it seems the Commissioners did not follow a standard set of questions for both the field interviews and the surveys, the majority of the interviews and surveys reveal the Commission’s preoccupation with freedpeople’s attitudes, willingness, and capacity to labor under federal supervision. The Commissioners’ questions ranged from blunt inquiries about freedpeople’s willingness to work—“Do these people [freedmen] work willingly for wages?” —to attempts to assess freedpeople’s thrift—“Do any of these people lay up their wages?”Footnote ³⁶ At other times, the questions were also framed in explicitly racial terms—“Can you tell me the comparative amount of labor done by a white man and a colored man … will he [a free Black worker] do as much as a white man?”Footnote ³⁷ Specific attention was also paid to the gendered aspects of free Black workers, with many surveys and interviews asking whether Black women worked for wages or whether their labors were focused on family life. This racialized and gendered aspect of the AFIC’s investigations has drawn significant scholarly attention.Footnote ³⁸

The interrelation and inseparability of the moral, racial, and economic presuppositions that motivated the Commissioners’ focus on post-Emancipation labor relations suggest that their racial ideology cannot be disentangled from their free labor ideology. The Commissioners and many of the white officers they interviewed understood wage labor, accumulation of property, and general thrift in explicitly moral and racial terms. In moral terms, the Commissioners, like many free labor advocates, associated the willingness to work for fair wages and the desire to accumulate property with the capacity to be self-supporting and self-governing.Footnote ³⁹ In racial terms, free labor, accumulation, and market competition were associated with whiteness—a point the AFIC would make explicit in its reports. Throughout the report, the abstract figure of the “white laborer” served as a standard against which the value of free Black workers was judged. For the Commissioners, the success or failure of Emancipation rested on free Black workers’ ability to embody and enact white bourgeois ideals.

However, on the whole, the Commissioners rejected strong essentialist notions of permanent Black racial inferiority, arguing in their report that Black people did not lack the “essential aptitude for civilization.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather, the Commissioners believed that the social relations of slavery had degraded Black people’s capacity for freedom—especially the desire for independent productive labor and the acquisition of property.Footnote ⁴¹ Therefore, the Commissioners reasoned that a radical change in the social conditions of freedpeople would be necessary. In this sense, the Commissioners’ intense focus on questions of freedpeople’s attitude toward labor and property should not be solely understood as manifestations of Northern racial stereotypes. Rather, the Commissioners were interested in whether the imposition of free labor social relations was both feasible and durable. In the minds of the Commissioners, the creation of a free labor economy would itself act as the paternalistic tutor for newly emancipated Black people. Just as slavery had degraded enslaved people, free labor would uplift them. Seen in this light, the Commissioners were inaugurating a form of paternalism that was conveyed through the creation and enforcement of economic relations, rather than the personal guidance of white abolitionists and aid societies.

The first months of investigation in the refugee camps proved encouraging for the Commissioners’ faith in the power of free labor. In one of their earliest interviews in May 1863 at Fortress Monroe, Captain C. B. Wilder, the quartermaster responsible for supervising Black laborers, testified to the role of Black workers in military camps.

Wilder went on to further affirm the value of Black workers and the need for timely wages—“they [Black workers] have always been driven to work, now our chief men will say that they have never known men to work better.”Footnote ⁴³ In another interview, the superintendent of contrabands in Norfolk offered similar testimony about the capacity of freedpeople as laborers—“They work well. Let me have the management of them and I can unload a ship twice as quick as I can with white men.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The Commissioners found similar attitudes beyond the most well-established camps in Virginia. Military officials from across the liberated parts of the South echoed Wilder’s confidence in Black laborers’ contributions and work ethic under government supervision. In South Carolina and the Sea Islands, McKaye’s interviews with white military officials reflected beliefs in the capacity of free labor and market competition to overcome racial prejudice. In his interview with McKaye, Captain E.W. Hooper, the aide to the Military Governor of the Department of the South, asserted that “I never knew a case where a man [freedman] had reasonable security of getting wages, even moderate wages, that he was not ready to work.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition to questions about wage labor, McKaye asked a series of questions about the habits and character of Black workers—“Have they [freedpeople] a sense of the rights of property as white men?”; “Are they good at trading?”; “Do you think they are frugal?”Footnote ⁴⁶ In each case, Hooper noted no significant differences between Black and white workers, noting that freedpeople were generally hard-working, frugal, and respectful of personal and communal property.

One interview with the former commander of the Department of the Gulf, General Benjamin Butler, proved particularly influential on the AFIC’s preliminary report. Butler had gained prominence as the originator of the “contraband policy” during his command of Fortress Monroe in Virginia. In 1862, he commanded the Department of the Gulf, managing the newly liberated portions of Louisiana, including the large plantations surrounding New Orleans, and establishing systems of supervised wage labor for freedpeople. Butler’s military occupation of Southern Louisiana marked the first large-scale attempt to rebuild the plantation system using wage labor. For the Commissioners, Louisiana proved a critical case study for Emancipation. In May 1863, Howe and Owen interviewed Butler, focusing on the viability of large-scale plantation agriculture using free Black workers. In general, Butler testified that wage labor experiments in Southern Louisiana showed that large plantations could be effectively cultivated by Black workers under a government-supervised wage system.Footnote ⁴⁷ Butler emphasized that he made no distinction between “poor negro labor and from white labor.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Asked whether Black workers required special supervision or government support, Butler argued that, beyond the general maintenance of peace, the federal government should focus on managing labor relations between white employers and Black workers. In particular, Butler argued that military supervision would be needed to ensure the full payment of wages by white employers while curbing vagrancy or idleness among Black workers.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Commissioners believed that the experience in Southern Louisiana provided evidence that a rapid transition to a free labor system was possible. Indeed, the Commissioners were even more optimistic about the viability of wage labor than General Butler. Butler’s system had relied heavily on direct federal supervision of Black workers. The Commissioners, by contrast, were critical of excessive state supervision of Black workers and preferred systems that allowed freedpeople to contract with planters of their choosing, rather than being forced into wage contracts as under Butler’s system.

The optimism generated by the AFIC’s early findings is evident in the second paragraph of their preliminary report to Secretary Stanton, filed in June 1863.

In reporting their initial findings, the Commissioners repeatedly adopt a tone of almost naïve enthusiasm for the ease with which the South may be transformed into a racially integrated free labor economy. However, such enthusiasm was at least partially a political and rhetorical decision aimed at countering critics of Emancipation. In June 1863, the efficacy of Emancipation as a political and wartime policy remained in doubt, and critics of Lincoln’s proclamation were eager to find weaknesses they could use to undermine its permanence.Footnote ⁵¹ Therefore, to the extent that the Commissioners saw themselves as advocates for universal and permanent Emancipation, they aimed to use their reports to provide empirical support for their position. The Commissioners understood that the more evidence they could present for the wartime success of Emancipation as both a labor policy and a recruitment tool, the greater their influence over the construction of a post-Emancipation free labor economy.

The Commissioners’ early optimism about the success of free labor experiments in the South profoundly shaped their views on the federal government’s role in shaping Emancipation and supporting freedpeople. Among Northern white reformers, including abolitionists, the great fear was that the destruction of slavery would leave formerly enslaved people dependent on government assistance. This fear of dependency had deep roots in American republicanism and free labor ideology, and the creation of a dependent class was seen as a direct threat to a free republican government. From the perspective of Northern free labor ideologues, such as the AFIC Commissioners, the success or failure of Emancipation rested on the federal government’s capacity to help freedpeople become “self-supporting and self-defending.”Footnote ⁵² To this end, federal power had to be focused on creating the conditions for Black self-help and self-reliance rather than risking the creation of a dependent class.

The question facing the Commissioners was precisely how such conditions would be created. For the Commissioners, their early investigations had suggested that wage labor could be implemented in the liberated parts of the South. Butler’s imperfect, yet large-scale experiences in Southern Louisiana showed the promise of wage labor as a primary tool of Emancipation. Yet, the particular ways in which the federal government would fashion those wage labor relations, and the role of federal supervision of Black workers, would have to be addressed in their recommendations. These dual commitments—one to the creation of a racially integrated free labor economy and the other to limited federal supervision—would fundamentally shape how the AFIC envisioned Emancipation and, eventually, Reconstruction.

3. Capitalist freedom and state power

The transition from investigators to institution-builders seems to have been a natural one for the Commissioners. As we have seen, the connection between investigating Emancipation and the creation of institutions to manage it was present in the Emancipation League’s petition. Furthermore, the Commissioners’ political allies in Congress eagerly awaited the Commission’s recommendations as political battles over the aftermath of Emancipation intensified throughout 1863. By June, after four months of compiling interviews, surveys, and field notes, the Commissioners issued their preliminary report. The primary focus of this initial report was to advocate the creation of a “bureau of Emancipation” to manage the transition to a free labor economy in the South. The report championed efforts by military officers and federal officials to move freedpeople out of refugee camps and into wage labor arrangements. As discussed in the preceding sections, the Commissioners believed that a rapid transition to wage labor and private enterprise would fulfill the chief objectives of their orders—to place freedpeople in “a state of self-support and self-defense, with the least possible disturbance to the great industrial interests of the country.”Footnote ⁵³ Rhetorically, the preliminary report goes to great lengths to stress that freedpeople will become a valuable asset to the federal war effort and the national economy under a “system of supervision not difficult to arrange or conduct.”Footnote ⁵⁴ However, in practical terms, the Commission’s reports presented a major expansion of federal administrative supervision of economic and racial relations. This tension between a commitment to limited government and the demand for increasing federal power would fundamentally shape the character of the Reconstruction state.

As with scholarship on the AFIC’s ideology, the AFIC’s state-building program has also been the subject of extensive debate. Early work by LaWanda Cox, James McPherson, and Herman Belz argued that the AFIC envisioned a limited, temporary guardianship over freedpeople followed by a rapid transition to free labor relations and the exercise of civil rights.Footnote ⁵⁵ More recently, however, historians have emphasized the power of the Commission’s anxieties about racialized dependence on government support, arguing that the AFIC’s ideological commitments led directly to the Commission’s advocacy for a laissez-faire post-Emancipation society with minimal direct government intervention to aid and protect free Black people.Footnote ⁵⁶ In surveying these seemingly contradictory assessments, Eric Foner notably concluded that the AFIC’s reports and recommendations “reflected the tension between laissez-faire and interventionist approaches to the aftermath of Emancipation.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Among scholars of APD, the long-standing view is that despite the expansion of central state capacity during the Civil War, the federal government failed to fully exercise direct and consistent power over the remaking of Southern labor relations and the enforcement of Black civil and political rights.Footnote ⁵⁸

In this section, I turn to the AFIC’s economic program to critique the dominant characterization of the Reconstruction state as ideologically and programmatically opposed to the use of state power in economic relations. In fact, I argue that the AFIC’s economic recommendations reveal an innovative conceptualization of state power to direct and influence post-Emancipation labor and land relations. Despite the AFIC’s rhetorical commitments to limited government intervention, its economic program shows that the Commission sought to govern through free market forces by using state power to control and monitor labor contracts, land sales, and the movement of Black workers. In doing so, I argue that the Commission aimed to shift the material burdens of Emancipation onto freedpeople while simultaneously securing control over the direction of the reconstitution of the Southern economy. Therefore, the AFIC’s economic and state-building projects are mutually constitutive, helping to fundamentally redefine the relationship between the federal government and the development of a post-Emancipation racialized capitalist economy.

In their preliminary report, the Commissioners argued that Emancipation was, at its core, a clash of labor systems.

The Commissioners believed that “governmental assistance and control” would be required to guide the transformation of the Southern economy from enslaved to free labor. Equally critical to their vision was that federal intervention be limited and temporary—“all special governmental measures … must be more or less temporary.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Commission’s economic and state-building program thus had two goals. The first was the creation of a free labor Southern economy. The Commissioners believed that the long-term success of Emancipation and national reunification depended on rebuilding Southern agricultural wealth, reintegrating it into the national economy, and doing so with free labor. The second goal of the Commission was to accomplish the transformation of the Southern economy while promoting the “self-support” and “self-defense” of freedpeople. Both goals had to be accomplished with limited federal resources and under wartime conditions.

To understand how best to allocate limited federal resources, the AFIC focused on identifying best practices from across the liberated South. In selecting the tools with which the federal government would reshape Southern racial and economic relations, the AFIC turned to labor contracts, land leasing, and, perhaps most importantly, the incentives of capitalist relations. The Commissioners’ initial fieldwork led them to believe that the federal state could create the conditions for a free labor economy by encouraging the development of stable, efficient, and productive wage labor. In their preliminary report, the Commissioners repeatedly noted that the chronic underpayment or missed payment of wages was a chief source of unrest among freedpeople.Footnote ⁶¹ Furthermore, the Commissioners emphasized that wages should, to the greatest degree possible, be paid in cash rather than in clothes, food, or other direct material aid.Footnote ⁶² Indeed, for ideological and practical reasons, the Commissioners noted that payment of fair, regular cash wages was the best way to secure freedpeople’s labor and prevent exploitation and abuse by federal officials and white Southerners.Footnote ⁶³

From the Commissioners’ perspective, efforts to establish a system of wages throughout the South served a dual function. On the one hand, the Commissioners believed that a system of fair wages would begin to transform not only the Southern economy but also Southern society as well. The Commissioners’ field interviews, primarily with white officials, led them to conclude that the chief characteristic of Southern slave society had been the racialized domination of enslaved Black people by white enslavers, which, in turn, produced dependence among Black people and despotism among the white enslavers.Footnote ⁶⁴ In contrast, the Commissioners’ unwavering faith in free labor led them to argue that the relationship between free employers and free laborers was characterized by mutual gain and independence rather than domination and dependence. By implementing and encouraging the growth of a wage labor economy, the Commissioners believed that the federal government would be eroding the social relations of slavery.

Second, the Commissioners argued that working for wages would integrate Black workers into capitalist social relations, helping prepare Black workers for life in a free labor economy. In the preliminary report, the Commissioners highlighted the centrality of wage labor:

The Commissioners understood federal oversight of a wage system as a critical element of a post-Emancipation bureaucracy. By taking the government out of the business of direct management and payment of labor, the Commissioners sought to exert federal power while minimizing government interference in private free labor enterprise. Although the Commission acknowledged that some direct federal management of Black workers would be unavoidable, they urged the transfer of labor and property to private supervision as quickly as possible. This was especially true for plantations, with the Commissioners recommending private ownership over government control.

For both labor and land, the AFIC envisioned a Reconstruction state that would govern and manage capitalist relations by supervising labor contracts and land leases rather than direct control. Federal control of the economy was ideologically anathema to free labor ideology and practically unsustainable. In theory, the Commissioners’ recommendation to focus on encouraging wage labor, accumulation, and, in certain cases, land ownership, especially among freedpeople, relieved the government of the need to develop a large bureaucracy while aiding the development of a racially integrated capitalist economy.

Initially, the Commission’s belief in the governing power of capitalist logics seemed well-founded, not only in the precepts of free labor ideology but also in the AFIC’s fieldwork and interviews. In the months following the publication of the preliminary report, the Commissioners saw many of their initial recommendations and findings supported by experience. Freedpeople continued to render critical service, both as laborers and soldiers, to the Union cause. The gradual improvement of wages and federal oversight of private enterprises seemed to confirm the Commissioners’ belief that a productive capitalist economy could co-exist with Black self-help and self-defense. The notable success of the free labor experiments on the Sea Islands was perhaps one of the most promising examples of a public-private partnership between federal officials and private Northern capitalists. Edward Philbrick, a Boston businessman and abolitionist, had amassed over 8,000 acres of prime plantation land on the Sea Islands and was working that land with Black wage workers. In an interview with the Commission, Philbrick argued that:

Philbrick’s profitable wage-labor enterprise suggested that the agricultural riches of the antebellum South could be preserved and perhaps enhanced under a free labor system. Furthermore, the experiences of the Sea Islands also provided some evidence that wage labor could lead to the acquisition of land by freedpeople. In the same direct tax sales through which Philbrick acquired his land, a small number of Black families had purchased land for homesteading and cultivation. The importance of managing most transfers of property through the sale and purchase of land rather than through direct state redistribution was a critical distinction consistently emphasized by the Commission. As with wage labor, the Commission thought the sale of land to Black families fostered thrift, independence, and, perhaps most importantly, respect for private property, which slavery had stripped from freedpeople.

While the free labor experiments in the Sea Islands provided early, relatively small-scale evidence for the viability of a rapid transition to wage labor under federal supervision, the most critical test case for free labor in 1863 would be among the contraband camps and cotton plantations in Tennessee and along the Mississippi River. Home to the largest concentration of freedpeople and critical to the Union war effort, the Commissioners highlighted the efforts of federal officials in General Grant’s Department of the Tennessee in their correspondence with President Lincoln.Footnote ⁶⁸ In particular, Commissioners Owen and Howe interviewed Grant’s Superintendent of Freedmen, John Eaton, several times and requested extensive reports on Eaton’s efforts to organize and manage the protection and labor of tens of thousands of freedpeople.Footnote ⁶⁹ In his report to the Commission, Eaton focuses most of his commentary on the general predisposition of freedmen to work for wages and the numerous contributions which freedmen are making to the war effort. Quoting from the reports of subordinates, Eaton relates that freedmen are “willing to work for money” and that the willingness of freedmen to labor is “better than anticipated.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Summarizing his experiences, Eaton concluded his report to the AFIC with a set of general recommendations on the management of freedmen. He begins by noting that “The whole cost of their support and supervision has been far less than what has been gained by Government” and that fears of dependence can be assuaged if proper measures are taken to encourage labor for wages.Footnote ⁷¹ The management of freedmen, Eaton recommends, should be carried out by federal officials who would require “all not voluntarily engaging [in work] according to fixed or reasonable rates with authorized persons, to labor under the direction of Government agents.”Footnote ⁷² Beyond supervising labor, Eaton recommends that federal agents help “lay the foundations of society” and, through the regulation of trade, provide “physical, social, and educational” guidance for the newly emancipated.Footnote ⁷³

Eaton’s reports echoed the general attitudes of the Commissioners and reinforced their growing belief that wage labor under federal supervision could accomplish the task of Emancipation without the creation of a dependent class of freedpeople. Eaton, like the Commissioners, believed that by enforcing labor contracts and limiting the ability of Black people to refuse work or white employers to refuse to pay wages, the federal government could simultaneously fashion free labor relations and discipline Black workers and white employers. The creation, management, and enforcement of wage work would be the means by which the government would create a free South.

The Commission’s recommendations, enforced with state power, to establish wage labor and land ownership were not merely a pragmatic policy to secure wartime labor and raise funds through the sale of confiscated and abandoned lands. The Commission’s program also shifted the responsibilities of Emancipation from the national government to freedpeople, both individually and collectively. Although the Commission advocated creating a bureau of Emancipation, its charge would be to manage and police freedpeople’s transition from slavery to freedom rather than provide direct material support. Commissioner Howe stated this goal explicitly in an open letter to Rep. Thomas Eliot, the sponsor of the House bill to create a bureau of Emancipation—“whatever plan is adopted should be founded on the principle that the negro, once emancipated, is as free as the white man; free to come or go; free to accept or reject employment; free to work or starve.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The message was clear. It was the responsibility of individual freedpeople to secure their freedom.

4. Multiple visions of emancipation

Thus far, I have argued that the Commission pieced together a set of recommendations whose policies and institutions, taken together, constituted a framework for what I call managed emancipation. However, it would be wrong to assume that the Commissioners were simply implementing a preconceived plan for Reconstruction. As per their original order, the Commissioners were acutely aware of multiple visions and proposals for the management of Emancipation and the reconstruction of Southern society and race relations (see Table 1). These multiple visions were themselves products of the iterative nature of federal emancipation policy up to the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, to properly appreciate the relationship between the AFIC, their ideology, and their fieldwork, it is crucial to understand these alternate visions of Reconstruction.

In broad terms, the Commission considered two plausible models for emancipation. The first was the so-called guardianship or “West Indian” model. Based on the historical experiences of the British Empire in the West Indies, this model of emancipation would have established an “apprenticeship” system under which freedpeople would be forced to work for their former enslavers and undergo a process of gradual emancipation. The Commissioners had spent considerable energy studying the West Indies experience.Footnote ⁷⁵ Howe ordered that reports and books on British abolition policies be made available to the Commission, and the final report’s footnotes make clear that the West Indian model weighed heavily on the Commissioners’ recommendations.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, the Commission’s assessment of programs of gradual emancipation, forced labor, and direct state supervision of Black workers was not solely based on the West Indian experience. The Commission had only to look at the experience of the compulsory labor programs enacted by Generals Butler and later Banks in Southern Louisiana.

Without an overarching federal policy for establishing free labor systems in the liberated territory, Butler adopted what he considered a pragmatic approach that sought to assert Federal control over Southern Louisiana by securing the support and loyalty of the planter class. The planters, for their part, were primarily concerned with maintaining control over the vast sugar plantations and enslaved labor. As a result, Butler’s orders sought a compromise with the planter class—the planters would swear oaths of loyalty to the federal government, provide a fixed wage to Black workers, and stop all use of corporal punishment. In exchange, federal forces would enforce labor discipline among freedpeople, restrict the freedom of movement, and supply plantations with workers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Butler’s attempt at a compromise proved immediately controversial. Planters resented the imposition of federal oversight and often refused to stop using violence to extract labor. As the AFIC noted, Butler’s rigid system of forcing freedmen to work on the plantations had led to numerous labor actions across Southern Louisiana. Black workers organized strikes, work slowdowns during the height of the sugar-grinding season, and, in some cases, even attempted to seize plantation land outright.Footnote ⁷⁸ In response, Butler sought to provide Black workers with greater protections under the Second Confiscation Act and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Issuing Order No. 91, Butler established a set of labor and land regulations. While these regulations continued to favor the power of the planters, Butler’s orders did require planters to pay a limited wage to workers, establishing a firm precedent that, from then on, all labor under federal supervision would be done for a wage or some form of compensation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Butler’s order constituted a foundation for post-Emancipation federal policy and effectively forced freedpeople into a condition of permanent wage labor under government supervision. Indeed, in a letter to Lincoln, Butler argued that “Black labor can be as well governed, used, and made as profitable in a state of freedom as slaves.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Under Butler, the line between slavery and freedom was very thin.

Butler’s successor, Nathaniel Banks, a conservative Republican skeptical of Emancipation, doubled down on his predecessors’ policies. In his first major declaration on the system of labor, Banks chose to “secure the objects of both labor and capital.”Footnote ⁸¹ In General Orders No. 12, Banks required “all persons … to maintain themselves by labor” and directed his forces to ensure that all “unemployed negroes … be engaged in this service under the control of suitable agents or planters.” In exchange for labor, Banks ordered that a “yearly system of negro labor, which shall provide for food, clothing, proper treatment, and just compensation” be established.Footnote ⁸² As a result of Banks’ order, freedpeople who had been seeking refuge in military camps or subsisting on abandoned plantations were forced into wage labor contracts under federal supervision, often working for the same planters who, until recently, had enslaved them. In response to Banks’ labor terms, freedpeople once again engaged in widespread labor actions. As under Butler, Black workers’ solidarity and labor power were often their most potent, and often the only, weapon against the combined power of the federal forces and the planters. Black workers’ labor actions secured some concessions from government agents and planters, including shorter workdays, greater control over their labor organization, and, at times, small tracts of land where families could grow vegetables and corn to supplement their food rations and sell some surplus on either the private market or directly to the Union army.

The various regulations and systems of labor and land management attempted by federal authorities in Southern Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley from 1862 to 1864 highlighted the tremendous challenges facing the wartime federal government. From Butler’s management of plantations to Bank’s fixed labor contracts, each attempt to establish a framework for the creation of a free labor, productive, agricultural economy had yielded unsatisfactory results. Nearly all federal officials tasked with assessing the weaknesses of these systems pointed to the difficulty of attending to the needs and demands of all involved parties, namely, Southern planters, Northern investors, freedpeople, and the federal government. On the one hand, regulations that favored planters and investors left freedpeople vulnerable to exploitation and abuse while burdening the federal government with close oversight of Northern and Southern employers and supervision of Black laborers. On the other hand, attempts to provide direct aid and land to freedpeople were criticized as detrimental to private enterprise, and many federal officials feared that direct federal intervention on behalf of freedpeople would foster dependence on the government and place freedpeople in a state of “permanent guardianship.”

In their preliminary and final reports, the Commissioners noted the unpopularity and general ineffectiveness of systems of compulsory labor. Permanent systems of government guardianship were to be avoided. Instead, the market and capitalist precarity would discipline Black workers—“a single threat suffices, in place of all other punishment, to check laziness and other delinquency—the threat, namely, of dismissal.”Footnote ⁸³ Therefore, the Commission’s faith in the power of free labor capitalist relations to reshape the character of both Black workers and white planters formed the basis of their vision of Emancipation. In contrast to the compulsory labor regimes of Butler and Banks, the Commissioners would draw on the wartime policies of the upper Mississippi Valley to create a “free labor” model of Emancipation that would form the foundation of the Reconstruction State’s economic policies.

Although this free labor model was partially articulated in the Commission’s preliminary and final reports, its fullest expression is found in James McKaye’s supplementary report. Compared with his fellow Commissioners Owen and Howe, McKaye was a relatively obscure figure before the war and likely owed his appointment to a combination of his abolitionist connections and his involvement in running the pro-Union Loyal Publication Society. As the decidedly junior member of the Commission, McKaye appears to have been selected to lead most of the AFIC’s field visits outside the immediate Washington, D.C., area. McKaye traveled to the Carolinas in the spring of 1863 and helped record testimonies from federal officials and freedpeople, both in the field and at the AFIC’s New York headquarters. These firsthand experiences appear to have given McKaye a more urgent, grounded understanding of wartime policies than his more detached fellow Commissioners. McKaye’s idiosyncratic perspective found its fullest expression in his reporting on the Mississippi Valley and Southern Louisiana. McKaye’s report draws on observations from his fieldwork in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana in early 1864, supplemented by later testimonies and interviews with federal officials, including Generals Butler and Banks, as well as the formerly mentioned Superintendent of Freedmen for the Department of Tennessee, John Eaton. However, unlike the Commission’s final report, McKaye also included testimonies from several Black people, quoting extensively from his interview with J.B. Roudanez, a member of the free mixed-race citizens of New Orleans, and Octave Johnson, a former slave who escaped to Union lines and was then serving as a corporal in the Corps d’Afrique.Footnote ⁸⁴ The inclusion and relative prominence of Black voices lend McKaye’s report a grounding in Black experiences largely missing from the AFIC’s official reports.

McKaye’s analysis and critique of federal policies in the Mississippi Valley focus on three aspects of economic and social reorganization: the labor question, the land question, and the role of federal state power. The first concerns the establishment, regulation, and oversight of wage labor systems, especially regarding the employment of formerly enslaved Black workers on plantations. The replacement of slave labor with wage labor was understood by most federal officials to be the primary metric by which to assess the success and sustainability of Emancipation. As we have seen, this meant the establishment and maintenance of labor contracts between predominantly Black workers and white employers. McKaye, in his observation of labor relations between Black workers and white planters, is torn in his assessment of the effectiveness of federal wartime labor contracts. On the one hand, McKaye notes that, across the Mississippi Valley, freedpeople willingly work for wages when paid promptly and treated fairly. Quoting directly from General Banks’ testimony, McKaye notes Banks’ observation that Black workers “readily accept the necessity of continuous and faithful labor at just rates of compensation” and that freedpeople will work as long as they are treated well, not separated from their families, and that their children are educated.Footnote ⁸⁵ Banks believes that these conditions can be fully met by his system of contracts and regulations, and his testimony to McKaye argues that “there is no difficulty whatever in keeping them [freedpeople] at work, if the conditions to which I have above referred are complied with.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It is clear from Banks’ testimony that he believes that a free labor regime has been successfully established in Southern Louisiana and that, with only limited government oversight, wage labor can and will replace slavery.

However, Banks’ system rests on two notable assumptions that were challenged by McKaye. First, Banks assumed that the federal government’s primary role would be to provide “sufficient supervision to compel the negro to labor.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Second, Banks confidently asserts that “I have no doubt that many of the planters within our lines, who are protected by the Government in the enjoyment of their property, honestly accept the new situation, and enter into the idea of free labor with sincerity.”Footnote ⁸⁸ McKaye challenges both of Banks’ assumptions. Drawing on interviews with Banks’ subordinates, McKaye argues that Banks’ belief in the need to “compel the negro to labor” contradicts both Banks’ own testimony and that of his subordinates. Col. George Hanks, a white officer of the Corps d’Afrique, argues that any resistance to wage work is a consequence of mistreatment at the hands of the white planters or from freedpeople’s refusal to work for former enslavers.Footnote ⁸⁹ In both cases, McKaye notes that the problems lie with the white employers rather than Black workers. According to McKaye, the white planters, not Black workers, are the ones who require federal oversight.Footnote ⁹⁰ Responding to Banks’ second assumption, McKaye quotes directly from the speech of a white planter, Judge Humphrey of Huntsville, Alabama:

According to McKaye, such views show that former slave owners saw federal state power as a means to reassert their dominance over Black labor, even if it meant accepting a limited wage regime. The white planters’ first and foremost priority was controlling labor. McKaye argued that the cooperation and sincerity between federal officials and white planters under Banks’ regulations came at the high price of subverting Emancipation. Furthermore, McKaye argues that even the limitations placed on white planters by federal regulations are rarely observed in practice. Drawing on witness testimony, McKaye reports that whippings of free Black workers continue even under the direct supervision of federal officials, since planters’ compliance is valued more than the enforcement of freedpeople’s rights.Footnote ⁹² In McKaye’s view, the continued domination of the planter class and their usurpation of federal power reflect the tendency of Banks’ system to privilege the power of the employers over that of employees. McKaye concludes that Banks’ system, if adopted as a template for the reconstruction of Southern society, would leave freedpeople in a “condition of perpetual subordination and subjection.”Footnote ⁹³

In contrast to Banks’ system, McKaye is more positive in his assessment of the Treasury Department’s regulations implemented in the Natchez and Vicksburg districts of the Mississippi. Unlike Banks’ system, the Treasury regulations established a higher wage rate for laborers and required employers to provide additional wages to care for sick and dependent workers. Furthermore, McKaye notes that the Treasury regulations gave Black workers greater freedom to buy their own clothes and provide for the education of their children.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, once again, as with Banks’ system, McKaye is critical of the Treasury Department’s reliance on year-long labor contracts, which has the effect of locking Black workers into often exploitative and abusive laboring conditions. McKaye notes that while the exigencies of war might justify the temporary implementation of some restrictive measures, both Banks’ system in Southern Louisiana and the Treasury Department’s regulations along the Mississippi do not sufficiently “recognize the freedman’s right to intervene in his own affairs, or to contemplate sufficiently the great end of educating him to self-control, self-reliance, and to the exercise of rights and duties of civilized life sufficiently.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In short, McKaye argues that federal free labor policies are denying freedpeople the core promises of Northern free labor ideals: agency, self-ownership, and self-rule.

It is important to acknowledge that McKaye’s criticism of federal wartime wage labor policies was not unique. Many Northern abolitionists and Radical Republicans echoed McKaye’s concerns about the leniency of federal policies toward the planter class and the lack of federal action to curb the abuse of Black workers by employers.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, McKaye’s criticism stands out in his skepticism of fixed labor contracts and his belief that recently emancipated workers could navigate a free labor market effectively. By the 1860s, the wage labor contract was seen by many Northern elites as the keystone concept in nineteenth-century free labor ideology. Historian Amy Dru Stanley argues that the wage labor contract constituted a “worldview” that “idealized ownership of self and voluntary exchange between individuals who were formally equal and free.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Many in the North saw the introduction of wage labor contracts to the South as proof that free labor relations could and would replace slavery. Idealized notions of contractual obligations led Northerners to argue that wage labor contracts would instruct freedpeople in the need to work for their livelihood and teach white planters to respect labor. Furthermore, the enforcement of fixed-term contracts was justified with arguments that such restrictions would offer wage security to Black workers and labor security to white employers.Footnote ⁹⁸ In contrast to the prevailing view among Northern elites, McKaye argued that such notions of mutual obligation and benefit were simply not possible given the massive disparity in power between newly emancipated workers and white employers. Instead of providing mutual security, fixed labor contracts robbed Black workers of one of their most powerful weapons to resist white planters’ abuses—the ability to withdraw their labor or contract with another employer for higher wages. McKaye argued that while it was important for emancipated workers to respect “the nature and obligations of a contract,” such obligations were only valid when contracts were entered into voluntarily rather than as a result of being compelled by federal regulations.Footnote ⁹⁹ The solution, then, McKaye argued, was to allow the free market to discipline labor and capitalists, with federal supervision limited to enforcing civil and legal rights to prevent abuses. McKaye’s criticism of fixed wage labor contracts and his suggestions that wages and contracts be largely left up to market forces were both incorporated into the last section of the AFIC’s recommendations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, McKaye’s concerns about the power of the planter class and his proposal to seize and break up large plantations were left out of the recommendations. In general, the Commissioners avoided the question of land reform, focusing instead on pressing for civil, political, and legal rights for freedpeople. The question of economic security for the newly emancipated was to be “left to the natural laws of supply and demand to regulate the rates of compensation and places of residence.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Federal intervention on behalf of Black laborers was eschewed in favor of market freedom.

In addition to the guardianship and free labor models, there was a third vision, or rather visions, largely ignored by the Commissioners—emancipated Black Southerners’ visions of freedom. Freedpeople across the South consistently articulated visions of freedom that resisted both white paternalism and capitalist precarity. Instead, freedpeople grounded their view of freedom in control over their labor and independent land ownership. Freedpeople made sustained demands for the redistribution of land and federal protection from white violence. In place of the precarity of the market and the exploitation of wage labor, many Black communities engaged in practices of mutual aid, subsistence agriculture, and cooperative labor. In contrast to the preeminence of the contract in both free labor and guardianship models, Black workers often resisted the imposition of fixed-term contracts, preferring task-based wage labor contracts that offered greater flexibility and autonomy. Furthermore, in ways that mirror the emerging labor demands of the working classes throughout the industrialized world, Black workers often emphasized control over their time as a primary labor concern. White planters, accustomed to being able to demand labor from “dawn to dusk,” quickly found out that emancipated workers demanded control over the laboring hours.Footnote ¹⁰² In their constant assertion of their labor power, even in the face of tremendous white violence, Black workers expressed a vision of freedom rooted in control of one’s labor, time, and subsistence. Perhaps even more significantly, freedpeople demanded a right to land above all else. The tensions between freedpeople’s conceptualization of their right to land and the federal government’s efforts to establish a free labor economy were nowhere more apparent than in the Carolina Sea Islands and the Mississippi River Valley.

In the Carolina Sea Islands, freedpeople forcefully resisted attempts to force them into wage work or to prevent them from acquiring land. Reflecting attitudes that began under wartime Emancipation, Erastus Evanson, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Charleston, complained that “They [Freedpeople] appear to be willing to work, but are decisive in their expressions, to work for no one but themselves: a few have told me that they would contract with ‘northern’ men, but that they would starve before they would contract with others.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Even when freedpeople agreed to work the land purchased by Northerners, they still maintained that they were the true owners of the land and that their right to the land and independence superseded the rights of the Northern investors. Later in his report, Evanson was even more blunt in his assessment of freedpeople’s commitment to controlling their land and labor—“They have generally the idea that the Islands are theirs, and those who are not so sanguine in this, are firm in their declarations, that no one shall prevent them from occupying and cultivating them, as they see fit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Labor and the right to land, much like freedom and independence, went hand-in-hand for freedpeople in the aftermath of slavery. They rejected calls by Northerner investors and reformers like Edward Atkinson and Edward Philbrick, both of whom contributed reports to the AFIC, to submit to working for a wage on plantations, preferring instead to farm their own land and manage their own labor regimes. For many freedpeople, their right to the land had already been earned through 250 years of enslaved labor, and Northern investors had no right to either buy the land or attempt to manage their labor. Decrying Northern attempts to purchase land in the South, one unnamed St. Helena freedman’s sentiments were recorded in a letter to a Philadelphia schoolteacher:

Along the lower Mississippi River, freedpeople worked with federal officials, including the Superintendent of Freedmen for the Department of the Tennessee, John Eaton, to secure land leases and labor contracts that enabled them to work independently of white planters. By 1864, 180 Black lessees had cultivated nearly 6,000 acres of land and provided care and employment for almost 2,000 fellow freedpeople. Similar success in independent Black cultivation of land was noted in Arkansas, Alabama, and the Carolinas. Eaton reported that of all the forms of free labor and land management currently under federal supervision, “the independent Negro cultivator was without a doubt the most successful.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Eaton’s enthusiasm for leasing land to freedpeople found its way into his extensive correspondence with the AFIC Commissioners, adding first-hand testimony of the capacity of freedpeople for independent, free labor.

While it is certain that freedpeople were not uniform in their conception of the right to land, the existing historical record strongly suggests that adapting and reconfiguring rights language to make claims on land was widespread, both geographically and across various kinship networks. Freedpeople consistently framed their right to land as earned through their labor and owed to them by the government. They contrasted their right to the land with capitalist understandings of rights based in contract and legal title.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Land, for freedpeople, was more than a productive asset to be owned and exploited; it was the material basis for resisting the reintroduction of white domination and exploitation. Most importantly, the right to land expressed a desire for a new kind of relationality that prioritized mutuality and communal self-governance over capitalist logics of profit and production.