The irrelevance of scholarship that takes as its focus the study of working-class experience has been so frequently asserted in recent years that the “crisis in labor history” seems by now an almost seasonal affliction. In “post-industrial” societies like the United States, linked ostensibly in our “new” age by networks of global consumption rather than production, a concentration on class relations grates on the postmodern sensibility as a throwback—artificially imposed, antiquarian, banal. Celebrated by the field's adversaries in and outside of higher education as an overdue comeuppance for “tenured radicals,” lamented by others determined to hold onto one of the rare spaces in American public life not yet overrun by neoliberal conformity, few on either side seem inclined to question whether declarations about the terminal demise of labor history might, in fact, be premature. Measured in narrow terms—the reduction in faculty positions earmarked for the field, the absence of “traditional” labor history from the undergraduate curriculum, the difficulties faced by labor studies programs trying to hold their own—the situation can seem bleak. But if we move away from territorial and market calculations and ask instead whether imaginative attempts to uncover and interpret changing class relations can illuminate problems otherwise neglected or impenetrable, there are solid grounds for optimism. The decline of labor history as a stand-alone field can be read as a symptom of terminal crisis, but it might in some ways signify an important coming of age.

The most striking measure of advance is the exceptionally fertile engagement over the past forty years between African American and US working-class history. That relationship might seem an intrinsic one, with overlaps and connections too obvious to evade, but whatever fusion scholars have accomplished over the past generation has developed out of an intensive debate, involving a very public (now celebrated) airing of labor history's “race problem.”Footnote ¹ Without suggesting that we have arrived at the end of that process, it is worth identifying some of the elements that have favored the productive exchange generated by these tensions. The most obvious of these was singled out by Steven Hahn in a prizewinning study that openly flaunted its transcending of established conceptual boundaries: African Americans have been “more consistently a part of the nation's working class, over a more extended period,” he writes, “than any other social, ethnic, or racial group.” Labor history cannot ignore the very real divisions that have, for so much of the American past, divided black and white workers, or assume that a conservative, frequently hostile official labor movement provided an arena congenial to black resistance, but accounts that separate African American and working-class history are untenable.Footnote ²

This inseparability was powerfully asserted in relation to the most profound social upheaval that the United States has ever yet experienced: Reconstruction—the attempt to remake the former slave South, and indeed the nation, in the aftermath of the Civil War and slave emancipation. In a pioneering study that remains, three-quarters of a century after its publication, the touchstone for discussions of the “complex interpenetration of racial, class, and social conflict,”Footnote ³ W.E.B. Du Bois established both the salience of the labor question to the main lines of American history and the centrality of black workers in the history of working-class mobilization. The critical weakness of the labor movement that emerged among northern white workers in the years straddling the Civil War, he insisted, was that it “never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”Footnote ⁴ The “blind spot” that had yielded such debilitating consequences for organized labor was replicated, to varying degrees, in a tradition of labor scholarship that grew up alongside the trade union movement and rarely stepped out beyond an institutional orientation.

Partly owing to Du Bois's enduring influence, emancipation remains the site for an extraordinarily fruitful examination of the relationship between changing class relations and the tumultuous series of clashes over the reconfiguring of freedom in the aftermath of slavery. Historians rooted in the US experience have over the past quarter century made a significant contribution to a burgeoning comparative literature focused on the relationship between race, labor, and citizenship that aims to identify the shared and distinctive features in post-emancipation societies stretching from the American South through the Caribbean and on to Brazil and mainland South America.Footnote ⁵ That undertaking has in turn lifted US scholarship out of the parochialism that marked it for so long, generating a series of closely researched studies that add immensely to what Du Bois was able to tell us about the struggle to remake American society, to the point where, as Susan O'Donovan puts it in Becoming Free in the Cotton South, it becomes possible to delineate the “universal and particular” elements in the “multiple configurations of freedom” that emerged and fought for permanence across the former slave states. Hers is one of a series of recent studies grounded in the “elaborate series” of locally-inflected “power relations” that, as Eric Foner observed some years ago, everywhere left their stamp on the “outcome of the process of emancipation.” Early pleas by Foner and others to take seriously both the local permutations and the universal elements in US emancipation find an answer in the long-awaited publication of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project's Land and Labor, 1865, itself a permanent testament to the critical engagement initiated by Du Bois and taken up in earnest over the past generation.Footnote ⁶

Of the four studies under review, Stanley Engerman's Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom, a revised version of his 2005 Fleming Lectures, offers in two slim chapters and a postscript a comparative framework for attempting to situate the rise and fall of US slavery over time and space. Conversant with a transnational historiography on labor and coercion, Engerman brings the algebraic and unsentimental perspective of an economic historian to bear in attempting to contextualize American slavery, with both positive and negative results. The author succeeds in setting out for readers much of the common ground shared by comparative historians of emancipation, and does so with brevity and erudition. In a world in which unfree labor of one form or another was the rule and not the exception, there was very little that was peculiar about the South's “peculiar institution,” Engerman reminds us; the “truly unusual cases” (16–17) were the Caribbean sugar colonies, where slaves commonly outnumbered free whites nine and ten to one, and where slave mortality reached horrific levels. The emancipations that rolled out across the New World after Saint Domingue varied according to local circumstances, but “the similarity in timing, in [antislavery] arguments, and in policies suggests the usefulness of examining a broader … pattern, not just the country-specific factors usually stressed.” (42) The “depiction of free labor as being in binary opposition to slave labor conveys the spirit of the nineteenth-century antislavery argument,” (79) Engerman writes, but this dichotomy is called into question by recent scholarship that finds, in the nominally free-labor arrangements that followed emancipation, enduring vestiges of physical and economic coercion and persistent racial inequality.

Despite these insights, however, Engerman's study suffers from two critical weaknesses. In seeking to establish the unexceptional nature of American slavery, the author obscures the important features that distinguished New World slavery from both its precedents in the ancient world and parallel, but qualitatively different, systems of coercion practiced by some indigenous groupings in parts of Africa and the Americas. As Robin Blackburn has argued, the New World slave systems were “not based on an old world prototype;” instead they drew upon “traditional materials” in a “thoroughly commercial” context to emerge from the seventeenth-century plantation revolution distinctive and new.Footnote ⁷ Among the most prominent features of the new order was its association of “race” with status, yet in a comparative study intended to mark out the singular features of American slavery, racism barely figures in Engerman's discussion, fleetingly mentioned for the first time almost two-thirds of the way through the book—in relation to Australia. (58) Insofar as US slavery was distinctive at all, Engerman's account implies, it was its benign qualities that made it stand out. To the extent that effective struggles against modern slavery developed, these were driven forward not by the slaves themselves but by “[Christian] settlers from Western Europe and their descendants.” (42) In measuring black progress in the post-emancipation period—an issue we will revisit below—the author bolsters his positive assessment by weighing the number of black lynching victims in the American South (1880–1950) against the higher toll suffered by Afro-Cubans in the (US-assisted) repression that followed the 1912 Rebellion (66)—a comparison that seems incongruous, even contrived. A more credible analogy might be made with the violence of Redemption in the mid-1870s South, with fatalities that almost certainly exceeded the Cuban repression.Footnote ⁸

The other weakness evident in the study is the author's attachment to a narrow economic history that enshrines the separation between politics and economics and sidelines human agency, an approach that seems especially unsuited for assessing such an intensely politicized process as emancipation, where such divisions were obliterated and in which the objects of history became, fleetingly, its subjects. The result is an account that, to a point, offers real insights, but which also seems inert, unable to capture freedom's dynamic, contingent quality. “Land-labor ratios” (the relative availability of plots of land to freedpeople) were no doubt important in generating “different outcomes” after emancipation. (52–53) But the author's passing observation that in the absence of a “means of redesigning the system of … wealth distribution [and] political power, certain imbalances … will persist even with emancipation and legal freedom” (78) points to the importance of sustained attention to political mobilization among former slaves and their allies, an aspect of US emancipation almost entirely missing from this study.

In neglecting this mobilization Engerman is out of step with perhaps the most conspicuous trend in new scholarship on emancipation in the US South—a turn away from broad generalizations about freedpeoples' “agency” and toward a synthesis that rests on the wide variation in ex-slaves' ability to shape freedom during Reconstruction. Cumulatively these render it possible to identify both the shared elements in black life across the region and the varying capacity of freedpeople to mobilize and assert their interests in the face of white hostility. It would be difficult to find two studies that illustrate these disparities more convincingly than O'Donovan's Becoming Free in the Cotton South, straddling slavery and the critical early years of emancipation in southwestern Georgia, and Moon-Ho Jung's Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, focusing on planters' attempts to supplant insubordinate free black labor with imported Asian workers in southern Louisiana's sugar parishes. O'Donovan is most explicitly committed to teasing out the “universal and particular” aspects of slavery and emancipation in Georgia's late-developing cotton frontier, but Jung's setting, tied to the Old South but with deep, longstanding ties to Cuba and the Caribbean, also lends itself to a discussion of the unevenness of emancipation across the South.

Although her tightly-argued study delivers a number of conceptual advances that merit wide discussion, O'Donovan's most fundamental contribution is to reiterate, on the basis of extensive research in Freedmen's Bureau (BRFAL) Records and elsewhere, a point made by Steven Hahn and others about the ways in which the multiple legacies carried over from slavery are inscribed into the new relations that freedpeople and their former owners negotiate after emancipation. But where Hahn has emphasized the critical positive role that the “slaves' politics” could play in galvanizing freed communities for new challenges,Footnote ⁹ O'Donovan demonstrates that the inheritance in “a region where slave society arrived fast, ferociously, and late” (3) could also be an encumbrance. The development of a “full-blown slave society,” (15) a process spread over a century or more elsewhere in the South was compressed into two or three decades in southwestern Georgia, presenting laborers with real difficulties in constructing stable, cohesive communities that could carve out some minimal space where their owners' domination was mitigated. The rural isolation of slave laborers under cotton's voracious labor regime left little opportunity for collective assertion and denied bound women even the limited access to public space that some had known before forced migration from the more urbanized upper South. This had implications for the region's wartime experience, where planters' authority showed little sign of crumbling until quite late, for inscribing gender into slavery and freedom in especially disadvantageous ways, and for limiting the room for maneuver available to freedpeople generally in the period immediately after emancipation.

O'Donovan insists that gender was “[n]ever a parallel story or a secondary story,” (2) but developed organically, entangled with the evolution of race and labor relations in the cotton district, and that planters' assumptions counted for much in constructing the predicament in which freedwomen eventually found themselves in. As elsewhere, planters' resentment over being compelled to treat their former slaves as free laborers gave way to, or was complicated by, an astute appreciation of the advantages that the new, free labor regime offered for ridding themselves of unproductive laborers—“the old, decrepit, worn-out &c.,” (157) and especially freedwomen of childbearing age. This was an especially stark reversal of their worth to employers under slavery, and “black women stumbled especially hard,” O'Donovan writes, “as they attempted to cross freedom's irregular and seemingly capricious surfaces.” (161) This treacherous new scenario imposed powerful incentives for freedwomen to link themselves permanently, through marriage, to wage-earning men, who were, in turn, elevated to new status in the domestic sphere, agreeing in labor contracts drawn up by Freedmen's Bureau agents to “govern [their] families” (194) to ensure a steady output. Thus the contradictory results of freedwomen's attempt to stave off the planter's assault: in resisting marginalization, they helped fashion a family-based wage labor system that their employers would ultimately wield to their own advantage.

Although it arrived late and in less thunderous tones than in other, more favorable contexts in the South, the political revolution detonated by emancipation rolled over southwestern Georgia as well, and O'Donovan's grasp of the sources makes her adept at pinpointing its origins in the cotton district and uncovering the critical relationship between local and statewide agitation and developments at a national level. Mindful that black Georgians did not bring into Reconstruction “a singular vision of the state they yearned so badly to call their own,” (208) she illuminates important differences between the “redistributive … radicalism” animating field hands and the “cautious Republicanism” advocated by mainly urban-based moderates who “embraced the same principles of industriousness, frugality, and self-perfectibility that animated so many of the Northerners on duty in the post-Civil War South.” (237–238) Planters found this moderation preferable to confiscatory ambitions but ultimately, of course, they cast their lot with a paramilitary campaign that would take aim at both tendencies.

The expulsion of black elected representatives from the Georgia state legislature in September 1868, followed closely by the massacre at Camilla, in the heart of O'Donovan's territory, “drove black radicalism in southwest Georgia to ground;” though freedpeople “never completely yielded” in the reversal that Redemption enforced, planters administered a “pummeling” in Camilla's aftermath. (262, 268, 271) O'Donovan's sober rendering cuts hard against a post-civil rights era historiography that scours even the most inhospitable terrain of the past for evidence of black agency, and usually finds it, but it is a judicious and convincing assessment with insights that should help to recalibrate this important, ongoing debate. Hers is one of a number of recent studies that acknowledge both the enhanced scope for black assertion after emancipation and the continuing constraints on freedpeoples' ability to turn aspirations into tangible gains.

Coolies and Cane highlights the very different scenario that emancipation gave rise to in southern Louisiana's sugar parishes, though that is not its author's main concern. Moon-Ho Jung's study rests upon the important earlier scholarship of John Rodrigue, Rebecca Scott, and others,Footnote ¹⁰ which highlighted the exceptional and enduring power of black workers in the region's sugar industry, a clout rooted in the collective character of the work process and the vulnerability of the sugar crop to effective strike action. He provides ample evidence that the “level of disruption and defiance [evident among freed blacks] stunned and overwhelmed planters and Union troops alike;” employers “looked abroad to cope with their postwar predicament because the world they knew and ruled was no more.” (53, 62) Two aspects of their worldview impelled them, eventually, to resort to imported Chinese labor as a panacea. The first was the long-standing relationships which Louisiana planters had established with their counterparts in Cuba and the wider Caribbean, allies and competitors who had inserted themselves into the transnational market for imported Asian labor as early as the 1830s. The second was their receptivity to the “conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide in the era of slave emancipation,” (5) a set of assumptions about Chinese workers' industriousness, docility and aversion to political meddling that deluded planters into believing—as the most prominent among them put it—that the “coolie competition [would] bring the niggers to their senses.”(86)

Though he roots his discussion firmly in the cane fields of southern Louisiana, Jung argues that the region's experiments with “coolie” labor had national implications. “Coolies” occupied a “netherworld between slavery and freedom” at a critical juncture, embodying the “hopes, fears and contradictions of emancipation.” (54, 5) If, as Eric Foner has written, the “outstanding single characteristic of plantation societies” was “their compulsive need for a disciplined, dependent labor force,”Footnote ¹¹ then the introduction of “coolies” seemed to offer to sugar barons what the New York Times described as a “happy medium” between “forced and voluntary labor.” (19) But even the best-laid plans can go awry, and the most disconcerting aspect of their endeavor for white Louisianans was the unwillingness of Chinese workers to live up to their racialized stereotypes. Where it was possible, “coolies” engaged in strikes and resisted exploitation by white employers and Chinese “head men;” they seem from the scattered evidence not only to have been unable or unwilling to excite competition from freedmen but more inclined to cooperation; and, perhaps most worryingly, they were visible among the mostly black, working-class throng attending Republican mass meetings in the plantation district.

Though their numbers in the plantation South were too insignificant to render the question of “coolies'” political status an urgent problem, across the Caribbean planters and the governments they dominated confronted serious challenges. In Cuba, for example, a more racially open-ended nationalism made it possible for both Afro-Cubans and Asian immigrant laborers to identify with anti-colonial challenges from the mid-nineteenth century onward; elsewhere, as the authors of an important recent collection have noted, the “political ambivalence” of semi-free laborers meant that “the struggle to become a free laborer could quickly devolve into a struggle to become a free citizen” as well.Footnote ¹² Unfavorable demographics, the deep hostility of a fledgling labor movement that shared in and shaped prevailing assumptions about Asian workers' indifference toward politics, and the especially rigid reassertion of racial lines accomplished in the overthrow of Reconstruction undermined whatever possibilities existed for Chinese laborers' militant pursuit of citizenship rights on US soil, but one can detect in the evidence presented in Coolies and Cane the same latent possibilities that were present elsewhere.

A key element in Jung's explanation for the failure to make more out of emancipation in Louisiana is the role played by “poor whites” in “enabl[ing] [a] counterrevolution of ‘redemption’ and postbellum white nationalism” (148)—and by anti-coolie sentiment in galvanizing the white alliance. While there can be little doubt that by the mid-1870s white Louisianans of all classes had fallen in behind the racially-charged assault on Reconstruction, Jung's evidence does not prove an active campaign among “poor whites” so much as an intensifying rivalry between the wealthiest planters and other landowners locked out of the inner circles and lacking the wherewithal to import Chinese laborers. Conservative newspaper editors who led the anti-“coolie” agitation claimed to speak on behalf of non-elite whites in attempting to hold the grandees true to their commitment to white supremacy, and it may well be that a majority of poor whites agreed, but even so it seems a step too far to conflate this planter-led campaign with the “Poor White South,” much less “organized labor.” (221, 224) At least a few white workers remained open, intermittently, to interracial strike action in the district as late as 1887, but, as Rebecca Scott has written, “with ideology, state power, and brute force all arrayed against them, Louisiana sugar workers lost, after decades of struggle, the space for [multiracial] action that Cuban sugar workers managed to keep open well into the twentieth century.”Footnote ¹³

In between the extremes represented in O'Donovan's and Jung's renderings, most freedpeople across the former Confederacy attempted to stake out their claim to freedom absent either the clear advantages enjoyed by Louisiana's sugar workers or the limitations that hindered cotton field hands in interior Georgia. Collectively their fate was to be decided not at the local but the national level, and every serious attempt to explain the defeat of Reconstruction (whether welcomed, as it was by the Dunning School, or lamented, as in Du Bois's and Foner's treatments) understands that reversal in national, and not merely regional terms.Footnote ¹⁴ Most comprehend the trajectory of events in the South as an important element in a broader social and economic transformation. Heather Cox Richardson very deliberately places her new book squarely in that tradition, though its geographical scope and temporal range render Redemption a tangential affair, and the freedpeople who were its chief victims an almost invisible element in late nineteenth-century American life.

West from Appomattox is an ambitious study that attempts to provide a broad framework for understanding the changes wrought at a critical turning point in American life after the Civil War. The elevation of middle-class individualism as a unifying national ethos—“the greatest triumph and the greatest tragedy of reconstruction,” the author argues—laid the basis for an “astonishingly inclusive” society but one that also “rendered Americans unable to recognize systematic inequalities” in their midst. (7) Key to the evolution and viability of this “middle-class ideology,” she argues, was the imagined West, a land that paradoxically enshrined individualism even as it depended on extraordinary levels of state intervention to make and keep it viable as a (white) frontier. Tracing the red state/blue state division popularized by media pundits in recent years as an explanation for conservative dominance back into the late nineteenth century, Cox Richardson suggests that hers is “the book that explains why today's political map looks like a map of the 1860s.” (1)

If the red/blue paradigm constitutes a “blunt instrumen[t] of propaganda” for rendering comprehensible the complex social and cultural fracture lines that divide the modern United States, as one of its most perceptive critics has argued,Footnote ¹⁵ it is more problematic when projected backwards over more than a century in time. Clearly, in the wake of an electoral season that witnessed one candidate attempting to boost her viability by pointing to the absence of support for her African American rival “among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans,”Footnote ¹⁶ there is substance to the author's assertions about the long pedigree of politics that pit “hardworking individuals” against advocates for “special interests.” Still it is not clear that this is the best way to understand the changes wrought in the long reconstruction that, in this rendering, lasted until the new century. While West from Appomattox is grounded in an important insight about the interrelatedness of reversal in the South, consolidation in the North, and expansion in the West and beyond, it rests on a questionable methodology and a string of dubious historical judgments and ambiguities that, cumulatively, undermine its interpretive power.

Methodologically, Cox Richardson declares from the outset her aversion to “portraying the era as one of abstract Forces—industry, labor, suffragists, immigrants, African-Americans—conflicting over the Big Issues,” (6) and opts instead for a narrative constructed around the experiences of a number of individuals whose lives presumably illuminate the important changes transforming late nineteenth-century America. As a means of moving away from straight political history or rendering an otherwise overwhelming assortment of facts accessible to a wide readership, this is a strategy that makes perfect sense. It is clear, moreover, that Richardson has schooled herself in a wide-ranging literature on social, cultural, technological, and economic developments that anchor the personal vignettes around which her narrative is constructed.

Still, in a study that attaches so much to the consolidation of “middle-class ideology,” it seems reasonable to expect that the author might devote more attention to explaining the relationship of these ideas to the fundamental economic transformations underway. Readers will encounter throughout the narrative recurring allusions to “mainstream values,” “the mainstream vision,” “mainstream fears,” and “mainstream opinion,” but except for fleeting references in the introduction and conclusion we get little sense of how this “mainstream” ideology was constructed, whose interests its particular ordering of reality served, whether it resonated superficially or sunk deep roots among ordinary Americans, or whether its influence was subject to serious challenges over time. Too often this “mainstream” seems synonymous, in the endnotes, with the editorial staff of the New York Times or Harpers' Weekly. When we learn that their project evoked opposition from “disaffected farmers, miners, wage laborers, African-Americans, suffragists, and industrialists,” (164) one begins to wonder whether the “mainstream” was, in reality, a demographically marginal sect enjoying extraordinarily disproportionate influence over the nation's affairs.

The singular accomplishment of West from Appomattox is the author's success in fully integrating the West, real and imagined, into a wider national history. Here she articulates for a general readership a perspective that has gained wide acceptance among practitioners of the “new” western history in recent years. The contradiction between the West's enduring identification with “independence, self-reliance, and individualism,” and the reality that “[m]ore than any other region” it has been “historically a dependency of the federal government” has served as a cornerstone of recent interpretation. Richard White goes so far as to describe the West as the “kindergarten of the American state,” a landscape where “in some basic ways the federal government created itself …”Footnote ¹⁷ Central also to new scholarship has been the decisive relationship between an expansive industrial capitalism emanating out of the northeast and the “hinterlands” of its western periphery, where extractive economies would develop around transporting “the natural products of the landscape … to metropolitan markets.”Footnote ¹⁸ “Progress” came in the guise of an accelerated industrialization (including a large sector devoted to commercial agriculture) that left those Native Americans who'd survived conquest with a stark choice: as Cox Richardson puts it, “America's free labor economy meant either assimilation or death.” (74)

While in these respects West from Appomattox is consonant with recent scholarship, it is worth pointing out that many of the social strains that wracked northern society in the postbellum years, arising out of the gap between the free labor ideal and the reality of growing class division (and which, as the author explains in her previous work, helps explain the northern retreat from black freedom in the South) were also evident in the West from mid-century onward. There, too, Patricia Nelson Limerick suggests, although expansion was “supposed to create a land of independent, agrarian landowners and to prevent the rise of a wage-dependent laboring population,” in at least some sectors “the opposite happened,” giving rise to intense conflict—particularly in the mining industry—and rendering the West congenial to the no-nonsense unionism of the Western Federation of Miners and, later, the Industrial Workers of the World.Footnote ¹⁹ Even beneath the big open sky of the West, Richard White concludes, “endemic social [as distinguished from personal] violence” proliferated, and while “[b]oth the powerful and the weak” engaged in extralegal violence, employers and regional elites enjoyed “privileged access” that reflected “uneven access to political and economic power.”Footnote ²⁰ The past might often seem like a foreign country, but sometimes it's not. Even in a region that epitomized the individualist ideal, there are important problems that lend themselves best to an approach that frames diverse and seemingly unconnected developments in terms of an expanding capitalist juggernaut and the rapidly changing social relations that attended its swagger across the continent. The unbridled appropriation of the West's vast natural resources; the breakneck, chaotic sprawl of railroads and extractive industries across the “frontier;” the exceptional violence of the region's transitory, boom-bust outposts; the final onslaught against the Plains Indians' civilization and the intense racism directed against imported Asian laborers: the common element in these central features of the “winning” of the West is not their compatibility with a dominant middle-class vision but their testament to the striking juxtaposition between that ideal and the reality experienced by so many.

To return to the South, and to the aftermath of emancipation: In seeking to explain the reversals that freedpeople suffered during and after (capital “R”) Reconstruction, determining the relative importance of the varying prospects handed down from slavery, developments on the ground in the South itself, and the fickleness of federal intervention in a rapidly shifting national context is a difficult, imprecise endeavor. Still, Cox Richardson's account seems to me to suffer from two basic problems: in foregrounding developments outside the South, she diminishes the very substantial national consequences of the restoration of southern white “home rule” for racial and class relations after 1877; and in seeking to complicate our understanding of the perspective carried into Redemption by southern Democrats like Wade Hampton, she accepts at face value the self-serving, race-neutral and paternalist rhetoric with which they attempted to garner national support for counterrevolution in the South.

Beginning with the latter point, among white Southerners who became active in the series of related operations (including well-organized paramilitary campaigns) that succeeded in overthrowing biracial democracy in the South, it doesn't take a lot of searching in the archives to uncover large numbers who were frank and unapologetic about their motivations. Rejecting suggestions that the propertied whites dominating his party should accept black suffrage and use their economic leverage to corral a black constituency, one South Carolina Democrat who wished “no affiliation with niggers” insisted as early as 1870 that while “the privilege may be allowed the negro at this time to vote” the franchise was “certainly not a right.”Footnote ²¹ The combination of unrestrained racial malice and the class presumptions of those born to rule, so evident in white conservative agitation throughout Reconstruction, is almost entirely absent from this study, however. Wade Hampton is quoted without comment lamenting that the (white) South had its “property stolen” during the war; apparently his own tortured and tentative acceptance of black voting rights was rooted in having “resolved to direct African-Americans to support small government;” and despite too much evidence to the contrary Union military officials are alleged to have “treated former Confederates like dirt.” (20, 59, 69) The cumulative effect of all of this is a benign representation of the force that would bring Reconstruction to an end and the reduction of the most formative episode in late-nineteenth century race and class relations to an electoral contest between competing visions of “special interests” and advocates of “small government.” The Compromise of 1877, in which the reconciliation between southern conservatives and northern capital has been so plainly illuminated by C. Vann Woodward and others,Footnote ²² loses its national significance in this rendering. Race figures almost not at all.

On one final point Engerman and Cox Richardson's accounts converge, and point to an unsettling trend in recent historiography. There seems to exist among American historians a strong predilection to get ourselves past viewing the final overthrow of the last Republican state governments in the South in 1877 as a watershed or turning point. This emanates both from scholars like Cox Richardson, who argue quite reasonably that Redemption was part of a much wider series of developments and cannot be understood outside of an evolving national context, and from others, including prominent African-Americanists who complain that such a demarcation obscures the continuities in black initiative and agency. But as a corrective to one-dimensional treatments of the past this can be taken too far, especially when developments in African American life are evaluated in isolation from dramatic changes in politics and class relations. Du Bois's admonition about the inseparability of working-class and black history works both ways, and the stark contrast between Rayford W. Logan's earlier characterization of the period between 1877 and 1901 as the “nadir” in African American history and a new, post-civil rights era historiography that emphasizes persistent black power should raise the alarm that perhaps something fundamental—the enhanced capacity of whites to set the boundaries on black freedom—has been lost sight of in the scramble to uncover agency.Footnote ²³

Engerman's inclination to separate politics and the economy leaves him somewhat oblivious to the effects of Redemption on the lives of black Southerners. Pointing to increased black landholding (“from virtually nothing to … over twenty percent in 1880 and 1890”) he argues that the “period from 1865 to 1890 provided a more favorable set of conditions for the ex-slaves than did the half-century after 1890, “citing Frederick Douglass's positive (if defensive) comments about black gains in 1882 as “reflective of the spirit of conditions of the 1870s and 1880s.” (63, 61, 72) There are a number of obvious problems with this measure. First, much of this was petty landownership, and the percentage of black-owned farms that delivered little more than subsistence was considerably higher than among whites.Footnote ²⁴ Secondly, the moderate rise in petty landholding, increasingly touted by black conservatives like Booker T. Washington as an alternative to political meddling and “artificial forcing” of racial equality,Footnote ²⁵ coincided with rising segregation and forced expulsion from the public sphere. Thirdly, gains in rural landholding must be weighed against harsh coercive practices (like the ubiquitous convict lease systems) that took advantage of political and economic powerlessness to draw large numbers of black workers increasingly into low-paid industrial and agricultural wage labor.Footnote ²⁶ Engerman is right that formerly systematic “attempts to introduce Chinese and Italian labor” into the South “became unnecessary,” (57) but that is mainly because the new arrangements created by Redemption gave southern employers dramatically increased leverage for “bringing the niggers to their senses,” as Moon-Ho Jung's planters would have put it. The restoration of white “home rule” mattered most because the reversal it consolidated put state power squarely behind propertied elites' determination to re-subjugate black (and through it, white) labor.

West from Appomattox adopts a similarly positive tone about the period. Though he articulated a perspective that was widely shared among late nineteenth-century black elites, the central figure propounding the individualist mantra within the African American community was Washington, whose 1895 Atlanta speech Cox Richardson described in her previous work as a “radical and effective statement in favor of African-American power.” But where in the earlier work this positive appraisal was balanced by an acknowledgment that the “majority of Southern freedpeople viewed the world not as … economically harmonious … but as a struggle between the haves and have-nots,” black workers seem completely absent in this account. Also conspicuously absent is southern Populism. While scholars will no doubt continue to disagree about the extent to which white Populists and Independents were open to interracial cooperation with African Americans (and the contradictory historical record justifies such interpretive differences), it simply will not do to reduce the entire experience in the South to the staunchly racist variant of “anti-establishment” politics that took root in South Carolina, as this study does. Washington may have been beset on one side by the “rise of [Ben] Tillman's virulently racist populism in the South,” (279) but the Tuskegeean, and more so his white benefactors, considered even the limited interracialism percolating elsewhere in the Populist ranks an ominous threat.Footnote ²⁷

The most basic observation one can make about the outcome of slave emancipation in the United States is that free labor—the conglomeration of ideas that had animated many of the abolitionists and had been passed down through the ranks of the Republican Party—failed to deliver on the promise that it made to an expectant African American population for whom slavery was a living memory. One has only to browse the collected slave narratives to be struck by the large proportion of former slaves who concluded that their lives grew more difficult, more precarious, often more violent, after the end of slavery to question the emancipatory credentials of the social and economic order that came of age on North American soil in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Each of these studies illuminates, with varying effectiveness and in diverse local, national, and global contexts, that glaring gap between expectations and the new, post-emancipation reality. And while the distance between promise and delivery is more obvious in relation to the African-American experience in the postbellum United States, historians need not exert themselves too hard to uncover similar disparities in every major element in the national story. Despite a gathering consensus that tells us otherwise, the legacy of slavery, the problem of freedom, is with us still. In an academic complex that prides itself increasingly on subordination to market imperatives and sees itself as a junior partner in the “knowledge industry,” historians of American working-class experience are more favorably placed than most to engage the wider public in illuminating the persistent entanglement between race and class, itself the outstanding artifact of the unfinished work of emancipation, and arguably the most urgent problem confronting a society once more animated by the hope for change.