There it was. Section one of amendment thirteen to the Constitution of the United States said, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Slavery finally appeared in the United States Constitution in its own brutal guise, shorn of euphemism and indirection, on the occasion of its abolition. Note, however, that, while the amendment spoke of slavery, it did not mention freedom. In its silence, the amendment testified to the vacuum into which emancipation plunged all Americans,...

If freedpeople “accepted” tenancy as the system of labor organization that was to replace slavery, their “acceptance” implied no compromise of their own goals for freedom.¹ For the freedpeople, tenancy did not represent a stable settlement between their ideal of landownership and the slavery-like gang labor favored by former masters. Freedpeople saw tenancy not as the end of a short post-emancipation period of conflict but rather as a starting point—further back toward slavery than they would have chosen, but a viable starting point nonetheless—from which they would continue to move toward freedom. Faced with the power of southern...

Southern farms operated on credit more than on currency, and the power of credit to shape the lives of southern farmers is substantiated, ironically, by the widespread and passionate denunciations of credit by contemporaries. Commentators then and now have condemned credit practices for entailing a general economic backwardness on the whole South, dragging white yeomen down to tenancy and virtually reenslaving the freedpeople.

The standard story of southern credit concerns the villainous merchant who bankrupted his customers with usurious interest rates and starved them by demanding ever more cash crop. Southern landlords, fickle partners of the merchants, spent their energies...

Someone rang a warning on the church bell before the sheriff’s troops arrived. It was April 19, 1893, and the sheriff of Craven County, North Carolina, was marching on the black settlement of James City to evict the residents. He carried a court order announcing the return of the land on which the town stood, and had stood since 1863, to the control of its antebellum white owners.

When the church bell rang, the people of James City, many of whom worked across the Trent River in New Bern, “dropped their employment instantly” and ran to defend their farms. When...

In 1983, when the descendants of freedman Allen Parham and his wife, Kitty, celebrated a century of landholding and continuous occupation of the family farm in Granville County, North Carolina, they also recorded and rejoiced in the family’s other accomplishments.¹ The farm had grown from the Parhams’ original 20-acre purchase to 123 acres; the original house built in 1878 had been remodeled to accommodate children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Within this evidence of the family’s strength and endurance, though, the family celebrated most of all that both Julia and Claude Parham, the children of Allen and Kitty Parham, had been educated,...

When the black-run North Carolina Mutual Assurance Company wanted to advertise its services in 1914, the company chose to attach its credibility to an image of the postbellum household economy. The company printed a calendar, the monthly pages of which were stapled beneath a picture entitled “A Penny Short.” The picture showed “an old Negro couple seated at a table in an old cabin counting by means of a lighted candle protruding from the neck of a quart bottle money which they had saved. Puzzlement marks their countenances as the old man counts on his finger in an attempt to...