Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - The legacy of slavery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Preface to the new edition
- Acknowledgments
- A note to the reader
- Chapter 1 What did freedom mean?
- Chapter 2 The legacy of slavery
- Chapter 3 The myth of the prostrate South
- Chapter 4 The demise of the plantation
- Chapter 5 Agricultural reconstruction
- Chapter 6 Financial reconstruction
- Chapter 7 The emergence of the merchants' territorial monopoly
- Chapter 8 The trap of debt peonage
- Chapter 9 The roots of southern poverty
- STATISTICAL APPENDIXES
- DATA APPENDIX
- Epilogue
- A Bibliography of Literature on the South after 1977
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We have turned or are about to turn loose four million slaves without a hut to shelter them or a cent in their pockets. The diabolical laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life.
Thaddeus Stevens, Congressman from Pennsylvania, speech to the House of Representatives, December 18, 1865. Quoted in James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress
(Norwich: Henry Bill, 1886), 2, p. 129.Defenders of black slavery in the United States claimed that Afro-Americans gained much from being enslaved under the “civilizing” influence of the “advanced” society of whites. “No fact is plainer,” claimed Albert Taylor Bledsoe in 1856, “than that the blacks have been elevated and improved by their servitude in this country. We can not possibly conceive, indeed, how Divine Providence could have placed them in a better school of correction.” In the eyes of these apologists, slavery in the southern states was an “apprenticeship” that could prepare the blacks for freedom. “The truth is,” asserted Chancellor Harper in the 1840s,
that supposing that they are shortly to be emancipated, and that they have the capacities of any other race, they are undergoing the very best education which it is possible to give. They are in the course of being taught habits of regular and patient industry, and this is the first lesson which is required.
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- One Kind of FreedomThe Economic Consequences of Emancipation, pp. 14 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001