Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy

A fledgling system of capitalist agriculture transformed former slaves into wage workers and former masters into employers, yet neither group could comfortably fit into its new role. Armstead L. Robinson discusses black freedom in the postbellum South and the new set of social relationships that emerged, while Thavolia Glymph traces the evolution of the share-wage system into sharecropping. Barbara J. Fields explores the erratic advance of capitalism in the New South and its effects on the southern economy. Harold D. Woodman concludes that emancipation alone could not guarantee the triumph of a completely new social order on post-war cotton plantations.