Slavery: Nothing But Freedom

Among the revolutionary processes that transformed the nineteenth-century world, none was so dramatic in its human consequences or far-reaching in its social implications as the abolition of chattel slavery. Whether accomplished by black revolution, legislation, or civil war, emancipation not only eliminated an institution increasingly at odds with the moral sensibility of the age, but raised intractable questions about the system of economic organization and social relations that would replace slavery. Especially in the Western Hemisphere, plantation slavery was simultaneously a system of labor, a mode of racial domination, and the foundation upon which arose a distinctive ruling class. As a result, its demise threw open the most fundamental …show more content…
The book restores to the reader an accurate understanding of the real effects of slavery’s demise as a multileveled and copiously complex issue that demanded radical transformations of the nation’s understanding of the American notion of freedom, the interrelationship of agricultural and industrial notions of labor, the social and political ramifications that were attached to reconstruction and finally the great impact that America’s emancipated slaves had on an international and global perspective. This book explains the working of emancipation in the Caribbean islands before the slaves were freed. The obnoxious problem was to keep the blacks working at the plantations. In Haiti, for example, the slaves rebellion led by Toussaint L 'Ouverture supported the right of blacks to start their very own plantations and living off their land by selling extra production to the stores. The abolition of slavery in the United States forces the economic, social and the political entities to work in a process of radical reconstruction that provides for free slaves the opportunity to integrate in to the American notion of freedom. In the American South, the emergence of sharecropping was a distinguishing feature that gave the black farmers a measure of independence. Share cropping was the outcome of the battle between the blacks who used their emancipation as a political right, and planters who tried to limit …show more content…
Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government and the imposition of a system of forced labor; the British Caribbean, where the colonial government oversaw an orderly transition from slavery to the creation of an almost totally dependent work force; and early twentieth-century southern and eastern Africa, where a self-sufficient peasantry was dispossessed in order to create a dependent black work force. Measuring the progress of freedmen in the post-Civil War South against that of freedmen in other recently emancipated societies, Foner reveals Reconstruction to have been, despite its failings, a unique and dramatic experiment in interracial democracy in the aftermath of slavery. Steven Hahn 's timely new foreword places Foner 's analysis in the context of