Description
Book SynopsisA study that deals with the courage and vigor with which African-American women fought for their freedom during and after the Civil War. Focusing on slave women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, it offers an account of their vital roles in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery.
Trade ReviewWinner of the Willie Lee Rose Publication Prize, the Southern Association of Women Historians, 1998.
"A pleasure to read! Brimming with insight, prickly about assumptions too easily arrived at in earlier literature, briskly and pointedly written. Schwalm's book is a valuable intervention in the critical debate over the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South."--Stephanie McCurry, author of
Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country"This compelling, well-documented work offers us an intriguing look at a particular group of black women and their struggles to work for themselves and their communities on their own terms. Clearly, it makes a significant contribution to Civil War and Reconstruction-era historiography."--Jacqueline Jones, author of
The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the PresentTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART 1: SLAVERY
1. "Women Always Did This Work": Slave Women and Plantation Labor 19
2. "Ties to Bind Them All Together": The Social and Reproductive Labor of Slave Women 47
PART 2: SLAVERY'S WARTIME CRISIS
3. "A Hard Fight for We": Slave Women and the Civil War 75
4. "Without Mercy": The End of War and the Final Destruction of Lowcountry Slavery 116
PART 3: DEFINING AND DEFENDING FREEDOM
5. "The Simple Act of Emancipation": The First Year of Freedom 147
6. "In Their Own Way": Women and Work in the Postbellum South 187
7. "And So to Establish Family Relations": Race, Gender, and Family In the Postbellum Crisis of Free Labor 234
Notes 269
Bibliography 363
Index 383
Illustrations follow pages 46 and 144
