Freedom: Volume 1, Series 3: Land and Labor, 1865

In the aftermath of civil war and emancipation, Southerners whose lives had been shaped by the slave system had to confront the fact that all people of African descent would be free. Some people - most but not all of them former slaves - rejoiced at the prospect. Others - including most former slaveholders - dreaded it. None of them knew exactly what shape the new order would take, but all of them came sooner or later to understand that the world they had been born into was gone forever. Northerners, too, became embroiled in the creation of a new social system. This documentary history examines the tearing apart and recreation of institutions and habits of thought that freedom required. By the close of the year 1865, and despite competing understandings about 'freedom' and 'free labor', slavery and much of the society that had rested on it had been dismantled. In its place arose the scaffolding for a new South, one premised on contract and self-ownership.