Whereas emancipation in Haiti was slave-led and violent, and emancipation in the British West Indies bourgeois-led and peaceful, emancipation in the United States was bourgeois-led and violent. It also, moreso than anywhere, came about as a result of a comedy of errors where actors exploited temporary opportunities to result in escalating crises.

It’s customary today to think of slavery and the genocide of the land’s original inhabitants as America’s two founding racist sins. It’s not odd for us to think of them together, and it wasn’t odd for Americans a century and a half ago to think of them together either. But they thought of them together in a different way than we do now: for many northern whites, the primary sin of slavery was that it was going to grab westward land that rightfully belonged to them.

The settler alliance between north and south had been shaky from the very beginning, resulting in awkward compromises like the bicameral legislature. Changes in trade patterns would cause them to unravel: over the first half of the nineteenth century, the customers of Southern cotton would increasingly shift from the northern United States to Britain. At the same time, the Midwest grew increasingly “tamed” in its overall social structure, imitating the pattern of mass smallholding that was being replaced in the East by burgeoning industrialization, while shifting its own “exports” from the South to the North. In other words, the pattern of trade would shift from this:

to this:

At the same time, the West represented a safety valve to the high-density East, allowing its wages to remain high and its civil order secure through the option of homesteading. But the South had other interests in the West: unlike other slave systems, because the United States’ peculiar institution was based primarily on cotton, its limiting factor of production was not persons but land. To be sure, sugar had led to considerable soil depletion in the West Indies as well, but the cultivation of cotton was (relatively speaking) kinder to bodies and harsher to land. The South, then, was hungry to expand Westward as well – indeed, more so, since its ruling class had less ambivalence on the question.

With the Mexican-American War of the 1840s and economic collapse of the continent’s other slaving empire, the Comanches, in the 1850s, military barriers to the incorporation of that land disappeared rapidly. The result was an escalating political crisis over whether new states (with their Senators and Representatives, and moreover general social structure) would enter the growing nation “slave” or “free.” When the question was to be put to a vote in the territory of Kansas, activists pioneered new election techniques, seeking to reduce each others’ electoral base by the most direct means available. One legislator nearly beat another to death on the Senate floor. Pretty soon Lincoln was elected, and we all know how that turns out.

The historical actors themselves didn’t, however. What both sides imagined would be an easy victory turned out to be an interminable and costly conflict, claiming more American lives than all others put together. It is unlikely that either side would have been willing to bear the cost had it known in advance, but war, once entered, is a dollar auction.

The unexpected transformation of the Civil War into a total war expanded the ambit of Northern aims from the political to the social sphere. Not all slave states had joined the rebels, and their support of the political war had ensured their social peace. But the question of what to do with the slaves in the territories reclaimed by the Union posed both a strategic and tactical problem. The tactical opportunity was faced and on variously exploited by military leaders on the ground. As Du Bois recounts it:

The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President, and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines. They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with gray and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt,—a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless, and pitiable, in their dark distress. Two methods of treating these newcomers seemed equally logical to opposite sorts of minds. Ben Butler, in Virginia, quickly declared slave property contraband of war, and put the fugitives to work; while Fremont, in Missouri, declared the slaves free under martial law. Butler’s action was approved, but Fremont’s was hastily countermanded, and his successor, Halleck, saw things differently. “Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them.” Such a policy was difficult to enforce; some of the black refugees declared themselves freemen, others showed that their masters had deserted them, and still others were captured with forts and plantations.

As the war dragged on, the tactical calculus became a strategic one. To win a brush war against the South it ought only have been necessary to show the plantocracy that they could retain more as loyal citizens of the Republic than as rebels, but having demonstrated their valor and intransigence, the question became one of destruction. Lincoln chose to burn his ships by Proclaiming the slaves (not in the Union) free, forgoing the possibility of a negotiated surrender. Instead, he won over half the population of the South to a now-revolutionary class alliance. With this and the adoption of scorched-earth tactics by General Grant, the Confederacy was defeated, and over a disenfranchised rebel population, the war’s legitimacy was capstoned by the Reconstruction amendments. The Confederates had hoped not entirely implausibly for intervention by their British trading partners, but the Empire had too much of their legitimacy invested in antislavery, and reversing that position would likely harm their terms of trade against the Iberian colonies even while preserving it in the case of the American. Thus began the further battle, which would determine the status of labor – free, unfree, or otherwise – in the South.

Once again, the fundamental dispute was over land and the determinant was the constellation of class forces at play: The Haitian state had expelled the military basis of the previous coercive state apparatus (the white militia) and become internationally encircled, and was thus powerless to realize its ambitions of becoming a developmental state. The British government faced almost no credible opposition to its aims, and being committed to formal state neutrality before the market, the relations of production found themselves determined by the supply of and demand for land. The Union sought a permanent peace in an area in which the non-planting white population was much larger.

Though only a small minority of whites numbered among the planting class, which had owned the great majority of slaves and land, around a quarter of white families had owned slaves at all, and though aspiration to the neo-aristocratic ranks would have been unreasonable for them, entrance into that lucky quarter was not. Every white had at least the opportunity to become a kulak with a servant or two to raise his crops or merely aggrandize his name, and this possibility had formed the basis for white solidarity that had stood toe-to-toe, for some time, with the overwhelming industrial superiority of the North. Though the basis of white solidarity would necessarily transform, it would, after the interregnum of military occupation and stillborn social revolution, again form the military basis for the social order in the South.

After the First World War, groups of patriotic young men who had braved death and danger together, especially with the leadership and initiative of junior members of the aristocratic officer corps – the squadristi in Italy, the Freikorps in Germany, the American Legion in the United States – would assist in the suppression of labor uprisings and eventually make up the vanguard force for fascism. So it was in the American South. After the decisive political victory of the North, the labor question remained in many respects a military one, and so the defeated went about immediately organizing paramilitary organizations: the Klan, the White Leagues, the Red Shirts, the “bulldozers,” and so on. At the same time, black militias formed as well, affiliated with the Union Army and Republican Clubs – though these would be among the first organizations to be disassembled after the end of Reconstruction, and with their inferior materials and drill did not constitute a credible threat to their opponents when that time came.

As such, it passed through several phases, dependent on the military situation; but the ultimate solution the process converged on was sharecropping, or what in other parts of the world was called métayage: land rented in-kind for a portion of the output. Whatever the level of exploitation, sharecropping can be recognized as a compromise form: centering on the family rather than work gang as basic locus of production, cash crops rather than food for family consumption, and (at least theoretical) proletarian “double freedom” of the worker to leave and be separated from her land. Wallerstein, noting that this had been the dominant form of land tenure throughout much of early modern southern Europe, has characterized it as a classically semiperipheral productive relationship. In explaining why it became dominant in these regions, he asks:

Why sharecropping however and not tenantry on the one hand or coerced cash-crop labor [such as slavery] on the other? Although sharecropping has had the disadvantage, compared to coerced cash-cropping, of greater difficulty in supervision, it had the advantage of encouraging the peasant’s efforts to increased productivity, provided of course the peasant would continue to work for the seignoir without legal compulsion. In short, when labor is plentiful, sharecropping is probably more profitable than coerced cash-cropping.

As for tenantry, no doubt this logic is more profitable still than cash-cropping. However there is a proviso. Tenants have fixed contracts and gain at moments of inflation, at least to the extent that the contracts are relatively short-term. Of course, the reverse is true when the market declines. Sharecropping thus is a mode of risk-minimization. It follows that sharecropping is most likely to be considered in areas of specialized agriculture where the risks of variance outweight the transaction costs. [1] 

Moreso than southern Europe, the American South’s export-oriented cash crop economy was vulnerable to price fluctuations. But land density had not changed with the war, and so as elsewhere, planters sought alternative means of restricting the mobility of labor. For the Radical Republicans, at least, the objectives were the same as those of the British government had been: that, per the report of the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, “[t]he natural laws of supply and demand should be left to regulate rates of compensation and places of residence.” [2] This was not true of all northern policy imposed during the war. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas, issuing orders for labor regulations in occupied Missippi, which would soon be copied elsewhere, explained that

These regulations are based upon the assumption that labor is a public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime… That portion of the people identified with the cultivation of the soil, however changed in condition by the [abolition of slavery], is not relieved from the necessity of toil, which is the condition of existence with all the children of God. The revolution has altered its tenure, but not its law. [3] 

The “indigenous” (legal) response to the question would arrive in the form of the Black Codes, to (as the Mississipi legislature put it) make the labor-power of the freed “available to the agricultural interests of the state.” [4] The Black Codes were “designed to limit the mobility of labor, drive blacks out of towns and back onto the plantations, reduce competition among planters, restrict the employment opportunities of freedpeople, enforce contractual obligations, and ensure the continued subordination of black people in the South.” [5] Proscriptions were offered not only for blacks directly, but for emigration agents as well. During Reconstruction such codes were voided, but with its ending they immediately resurfaced.

The exclusion of blacks from urban labor reflected not only the interests of white agricultural capital but also white urban labor. Like their northern brethren, white proletarians in the South were part of a nascent labor aristocracy occupying a relatively privileged position in the international economy, and like their northern brethren their strategies relied on a strategy of exclusion. This was expressed at the legislative level by segregation and at the firm level by the policies of white unions. The class interests of white labor in the South also exercised veto power over one of the planters’ attempted solutions to the labor problem, which being the imitation of “successful” transitions in islands such as Trinidad through the mass importation of foreign labor.

What the former Confederacy was not able to do was maintain the aspect that laborers found most degrading – gang labor. Even confined to a narrow choice of employers, freedfolk were unwilling to work under the whip again, wages or no. Planters expressed aggravation about this, but were unable to successfully reinstitute it outside situations of maximal coercion (for instance, through the growth of the prison population.) But they also knew no other methods of inducing work. Agricultural labor was not like an assembly line, where the motions of the different workers were so integrated that they were kept in motion by the production process itself; and direct monitoring (and inducement) of the pace of work was precisely what the workers objected to. Sharecropping, then, arose essentially as a form of piecework. It came about as a result of the struggle between the black rural workforce, the white labor aristocracy, white agricultural capital, and (at least for a time) northern industrial capital – the means each was able to employ and the terms to which they were able to submit.

Thus, not only were free peasantries formed in the wake of emancipation, but serfdoms, loosely speaking, as well. Once again, I think this should unsettle our conception of any particular relation of production being essentially “premodern.”

[1] Wallerstein, Modern World System, p. 105
[2] Final Report of the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission to the Secretary of War, p. 382
[3] U.S. War Dept., “Orders No. 9″
[4] cited on p. 63, Edward Royce, Origins of Southern Sharecropping
[5] ibid., pp. 63-64