The State and Revolution: Emancipation and the (Il)legibility of Black Freedom

• In Event: New Perspectives on Race and American Political Development

Abstract

Did emancipated Black workers influence the development of the post-Emancipation state? In this paper, I explore the complex relationship between freed people and white federal officials charged with managing the transformation of Southern land and labor regimes during wartime Reconstruction. In particular, I focus on a set of liberated plantations at Davis Bend, Mississippi. On these plantations, federal officials provided freed Black people with limited control over the land and their labor, in an experiment designed to show that large-scale plantation agriculture was profitable under wage labor and Black land ownership. Drawing on the wartime reports, testimonies from Black workers, and federal regulations, I argue that only certain forms of Black community and freedom were legible to white federal officials. These limited forms of capitalist freedom were then reified into the political and economic framework of the post-Emancipation state.

Author

• Rutger Ceballos, University of Oregon