Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy (Volume 18)

Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures

by Thavolia Glymph (Editor), Barbara Jeanne Et Al Fields, John J. Kushma (Editor)

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.

128 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1985

About the author

Thavolia Glymph is an associate professor of history and African and African American studies at Duke University where she teaches courses on slavery, the U.S. South, emancipation, Reconstruction, and African American women’s history. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and a coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Ser. 1, Vols. 1 and 3, 1985 and 1990), a part of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project.

(from http://www.oah.org/lectures/lecturers...)