Becoming Free in the Cotton South

by Susan Eva O'Donovan

"Becoming Free in the Cotton South" challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.

This boldly argued work focuses on a small place--the southwest corner of Georgia--in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women's experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery's demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O'Donovan's significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced.

"Becoming Free in the Cotton South" is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2007

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 3 out of 5]

In reading a book like this, one has to take its conclusions with a grain of salt.  Since books by self-avowed Marxist historians are of immensely dubious value on account of their ideological bias [1], one must read them for other purposes rather than to be (mis)informed.  Fortunately, this book does have much to offer the critical reader, but in ways that are perhaps grimly ironic.  At its heart, this book examines the difficulties the black population of Southwest Georgia had in maintaining their dignity in slavery in the face of brutal exploitation and had in achieving any kind of freedom after slavery ended.  This area of Georgia is one I know fairly well given my familiarity with various modular builders located in areas like Americus and Thomasville and the other small cities of this obscure region of the South, and the author points out that despite its importance to the Cotton Kingdom it remains obscure in terms of historical knowledge.  While this book does not materially advance the state of knowledge about the reason, it does offer a compelling case study in how radical political elements like those the author supports can be dealt with in an effective manner.

The 260 or so pages of this book are divided into several chapters by chronology, and examine the fate of the blacks of Southwest Georgia from the period of the beginning of plantation slavery in the 1820's to the "redemption" of the area by former slaveowners around 1868.  The author, as may be expected from her political perspective, spends a great deal of time wrestling with questions of ethnicity, gender, and class, bemoaning the exploitation of blacks and women and the cruelty of capitalism in valuing only those populations that could work and the lack of generosity of welfare payments on the part of even reconstruction governments.  The author seems to resolve the welfare trap of contemporary African Americans as being a mere theory and not empirically verified fact in the face of the history of the last few decades.  As cruel as slavery and its aftermath was, and it was cruel and unjust in the extreme, the concerns of even the charitable among the Yankees was justified in light of contemporary experience of learned helplessness and the results of the misguided attempts of governments to serve as surrogate husbands and fathers, as is the case at present.

Since the facts of life in antebellum, Civil War, and reconstruction Southwest Georgia are largely obscure and the author's perspective is unreliable to the extreme, the chief value of this book is in demonstrating how the resumption of power by the regions former slaveowners shortly after the end of the Civil War can serve as an example for rightly guided regimes seeking to stare out radical movements in the contemporary world.  The author suggests that adopting a logistical strategy that cuts radicals off from government largesse is vital in overcoming political spirit.  Placing the sinecures of radicals in jeopardy can reduce their outward political behavior to the benefit of the well-being of the larger community.  Those that attack at the legitimacy of our nation and its moral and political order should not earn their livelihood as parasites to that nation, as occurs at present.  How this may be done best is the subject of better writers and other works, no doubt, but this book gives ironic encouragement to how quiescence may be obtained through the judicious control of the government coffers and the diversion of those resources away from radical elements.  For that illustration alone this book is worth reading, if for no other reason.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slavery, for most people, is thought of as those that worked the farms and lived a life of horrible conditions but author Susan O'Donovan takes the reader to a whole another level of understanding of what freedpeople (slaves) had to endure during the time of the civil war and after.

O'Donovan looks at only five areas of interest, (1) How slaves managed their lives, (2) What new conditions the war brought, (3) What slaves did to enact those new laws, (4) The conditions that were created after the war, especially for women, (5) The idea of land and labor management. These five areas go into extreme detail, some horrific and some that is common knowledge to the reader, which shed light on just how slaves came to understand how to fight for their new rights, even when the whiteman was still threatening them and lying to them. The slaves managed to put black people into higher office to help pass laws but surprisingly enough, the white people simply ignored them or prevented many of them from passing in the house and becoming law. Voting was another dangerous action on the part of slaves for many knew that they would be killed before even casting their vote and even if they had the chance to vote, many times, theirs was taken out or somehow "misplaced."

This is not a recommended reading for anyone not interested in this subject or field for it is a very dense reading and only someone with a strong interest in slavery or southern reconstruction or a history major should read a book like this. It reads like a textbook format and hard at times to follow with the dates so some previous knowledge of the conditions in the south helps.


For those of the academic field, this is a book not to pass up. The reading is dense and hard to follow at times, but extrememly interesting and many times you wil be caught up in the conditions and hardships of the slaves themselves. It does carry some grahic details of conditions between masters and slaves but adds a great depth to the history. This was a great read overall.

If this is a subject that highly fascinates you then I would recommend it otherwise the reading does drag on and get dull at some points, majority of the reading overall makes up for those lags.