While the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments greatly complicated white women’s quest for political equality, they promised to usher in a new era of freedom for the men, women, and children who had been enslaved across the South. But would the passage of new laws and the revision of the Constitution be enough to protect the rights of the newly emancipated? As Radical Republicans worked to enact their legislative agenda in Washington, D.C., a new reality was taking shape on the ground in the South. Laws could only go so far in shaping this reality, particularly if they weren’t enforced. For their parts, former slaves embraced all that emancipation had to offer, from the freedom to reunite with lost loved ones to the chance to get an education.

After emancipation, many fathers who had been sold from their families as slaves—a circumstance illustrated in the engraving above, which shows a male slave forced to leave his wife and children—set out to find those lost families and rebuild their lives.

Some of the most profound changes that came with emancipation were those affecting the basics of life, from the ability to freely move about to the opportunity to live together with loved ones. Understanding these new realities requires an understanding of what life was like as an enslaved person in the prewar South. Slave marriages were not recognized under the laws of the Old South. So, although enslaved men and women could and did marry, they did so without any legal protections. The system empowered white masters to separate spouses at whim, and brutalize and impregnate the women they owned.  Enslaved men had no authority to protect or defend their wives. Nor could enslaved parents protect their children, who could be bought, sold, put to work, beaten, and abused without their consent. Parents, too, could be sold away from their children. Additionally, the division of labor idealized in white southern society, in which men worked the land and women performed the role of domestic caretaker, was null and void where slaves were concerned. Both enslaved men and women were made to perform hard labor in the fields.

With emancipation, former slaves could enjoy the bonds of love and family that had been so difficult to maintain while they were the property of others. Many thousands of freed blacks who had been separated from their families as slaves took to the road to find their long-lost spouses and children and renew their bonds. In one instance, a journalist reported having interviewed a freed slave who traveled over six hundred miles on foot in search of the family that was taken from him while in bondage. Couples that had been spared separation quickly set out to legalize their marriages, often by way of the Freedmen’s Bureau, now that this option was available. Many women took pride in maintaining their own families’ households (rather than their masters’), and sought other ways of helping to support their families beyond regular work in the fields. Men and women who had no families would sometimes relocate to southern towns and cities, so as to be part of the larger black community where schools, churches, and other mutual aid societies offered help and camaraderie.

Freed people placed a great emphasis on education for their children and themselves. The ability to finally read the Bible for themselves induced many work-weary men and women to spend all evening or Sunday attending night school or Sunday school classes. It was not uncommon to find a one-room school with more than fifty students ranging in age from three to eighty. As Booker T. Washington famously described the situation, “it was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn.”^[1]

One of the more marked transformations that took place after emancipation was the proliferation of independent black churches and church associations, many of which also operated schools. In the 1930s, nearly 40 percent of 663 black churches surveyed had their organizational roots in the post-emancipation era.^[2] Many independent black churches emerged in the rural areas, and most of them had never been affiliated with white churches. Liberated from white-controlled churches, black Americans remade their religious worlds according to their own social and spiritual desires.^[3]

Black churches provided centralized leadership and organization in post-emancipation communities. Many political leaders and officeholders were ministers. Churches were often the largest building in town and served as community centers. Groups like the Union League, militias, and fraternal organizations all used the regalia, ritual, and even hymns of churches to inform and shape their practice.

THE RISE OF THE SHARECROPPING SYSTEM

Most freed people stayed in the South on the lands where their families and loved ones had worked for generations as slaves. They hungered to own and farm their own lands instead of the lands of white plantation owners. In one case, former slaves on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina initially had hopes of owning the land they had worked for many decades after General Sherman directed that freed people be granted title to plots of forty acres.

The Freedmen’s Bureau provided additional cause for such hopes by directing that leases and titles to lands in the South be made available to former slaves. However, these efforts ran afoul of President Johnson. In 1865, he ordered the return of land to white landowners, a setback for those freed people, such as those on the South Carolina Sea Islands, who had begun to cultivate the land as their own. Ultimately, there was no redistribution of land in the South. The last ember of hope for land redistribution was extinguished when the Radical Republicans’ proposed land reform bills were tabled in Congress. Radicalism had its limits, and the Republican Party’s commitment to economic stability eclipsed their interest in racial justice.

Without realistic hope of owning land anytime soon, for most freed slaves emancipation meant the transition to wage labor. This conversion usually did not entail a new era of economic independence. Although they no longer faced forced labor under the lash, working for wages still subjected freed slaves to the whims of white supervisors. Many preferred to rent land, in hopes of gaining more control over their earnings and daily work life. But tenancy came with its own challenges. Slaves had emerged from bondage without any money and needed farm implements, food, and other basic necessities to start their new lives. Under the crop-lien system, store owners extended them credit based upon the promise that they would pay with a portion of their future harvest. In essence, the freed slaves used their future crops as collateral. However, the store owners charged high interest rates, making it even harder for freed people to get ahead. Store owners also commonly charged higher prices for goods purchased on credit as opposed to cash.

These are the circumstances under which the sharecropping system took root. Sharecropping functioned as a crop-lien system that worked to the advantage of landowners. Under the system, freed people rented the land they worked, often on the same plantations where they had been slaves. Some landless whites also became sharecroppers. Sharecroppers paid their landlords with the crops they grew, often as much as half their harvest. Sharecropping favored the landlords and ensured that freed people could not attain independent livelihoods. The year-to-year leases meant no incentive existed to substantially improve the land, and high interest payments siphoned additional money away from the farmers. Sharecroppers often became trapped in a never-ending cycle of debt, unable to buy their own land and unable to stop working for their creditor because of what they owed. The consequences of sharecropping affected the entire South for many generations, severely limiting economic development and ensuring that the South remained an agricultural backwater.