Postbellum

...Some scholars have seen this failure as defining the limitations of bourgeois radicalism...

...The first, that the liberation of slaves was quickened by their own activity in the form of a wartime "general strike," is not taken up by Foner...

...The essay represents a model in the writing of comparative history...

...Dictatorship of the proletariat" raises the complex question of the class position of the black workers quite prominently while Foner only belatedly discusses that vital point, largely in a rather apologetic footnote on peasantries...

...Faithfully following Du Bois, Foner insists that the Civil War hinged on slavery, that emancipation was an epochal moment of liberation, that Reconstruction turned on the control of black labor and its products, and that the political power achieved by freed people during Reconstruction created a unique and meaningful experiment in American democracy...

...others have used it to argue that not much of consequence happened during the post-bellum period, that the South's history is one of continuity before and after the war...

...The discussion of this topic is curiously brief and uncertain...

...Second, Du Bois originally referred to Radical Reconstruction in South Carolina as a "dictatorship of the proletariat...

...More systematic attention to the roles of poor whites and of Northern capital is needed...

...Moreover, the themes which unify the comparison—land, labor, and politics-succeed in placing U.S...

...The failure of the Radical Republicans to solve the "land question," to achieve the goal of forty acres and a mule for freed people, has long been seen as the central weakness of Reconstruction...

...Foner attempts to show how lessons drawn from the emancipations in the Caribbean were employed by U.S...

...David Roediger (David Roediger, a specialist in black history, is currently studying St...

...The balance of this essay, however, is a superb treatment of the transformation of Southern law regarding labor and property during the periods of the repressive Black Codes, of Radical Reconstruction, and of the Redemptionist restoration of white upper-class rule...

...More comparisons are in order, especially with such regions as the cocoa-growing area of Ghana and the coffee-producing area of Tanzania, in which sharecropping arrangements more like those of the American South did emerge...

...Reconstruction in a new light...

...Foner does not, of course, deny land's importance in U.S...

...That phrase, which Du Bois later dropped, is obviously fraught with difficulties in describing the government there, but in two important ways it goes beyond Foner's analysis that "black labor" influenced the State in its own behalf...

...it neither parades its pedantry nor wallows in minutiae...

...A second essay, "The Politics of Freedom," suffers from a wrong-footed beginning...

...Finally, Foner's book leaves us hungering for more...

...Many of the specific points regarding fencing, grazing, theft, taxation, and other matters have been made by others, but Foner produces not only a sure synthesis but also a nuanced argument casting repressive legislation as an attempt, above all, to control black labor as much for class as for racial reasons...

...He briefly describes emancipation and post-emancipation life in Haiti, the British Caribbean, Guyana, and analogous developments in South Africa (Azania), Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Kenya...

...Foner, particularly in the first essay, adds a comparative perspective which deepens Du Bois's analysis...

...It builds from a simple case study of a series of 1876 strikes against pay cuts among rice plantation workers on the Combahee and Ashepoo rivers in South Carolina...

...The concluding essay exemplifies how good local history can illuminate the broadest questions...

...It should provoke shame among historians that almost all of the Du Bois-derived insights in Eric Foner's Nothing but Freedom will seem new to most readers...

...It should provoke celebration that Foner has so well assimilated those insights and has brilliantly expanded on them...

...political leaders, North and South, during Reconstruction...

...Harvest wages in the strike areas of South Carolina were twice as high as those in the Georgia rice fields that year...

...Moreover, Du Bois's phrase makes us ask whether democracy during Reconstruction was an extension of traditional forms of American republicanism or a radical departure born of civil war...

...The sustained strikes restored wage reductions and thus, for a time, prevented the planters from driving black laborers into a relationship of utter dependency...

...In a nice irony, he dedicates them to the memory of Du Bois, the man most responsible for the demolition of Fleming's racist and elitist interpretations of Reconstruction...

...historian in this century-appeared in 1935, it found a sometimes hostile, but more often indifferent, audience in the historical profession...

...That hunger for more may soon be satisfied: Foner is now at work on a broader history of Reconstruction...

...The bigger lesson which Foner draws from these instances—and it is the lesson of the whole book—is that political successes mattered in shaping black lives...

...Louis during Reconstruction on a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies...

...Foner's three essays are based on his 1982 Walter Lynwood Fleming lectures at Louisiana State University...

...Even at that late date, black political power and the presence of a black militia helped forestall aggressive actions against the strikes by state government...

...he suggests that it was crucial not as a panacea, but as a political issue...

...Du Bois'sBlack Reconstruction—the greatest work produced by a U.S...

...My most serious criticism of Nothing but Freedom is that Foner might have taken Du Bois's Black Reconstruction still more to heart...

...Central to Du Bois's analysis are two concepts badly in need of revival...

...By focusing on Haiti and other areas in which the land question was "solved" by the gradual dissolution of plantations and the emergence of a freeholding (but fiercely exploited and desperately poor) peasantry, Foner reminds us that the possession of land without capital has hardly been a formula for success in the modern world...

...Not surprisingly, all sides of the Reconstruction controversy found support for their own policies somewhere in the West Indian past...

...Land redistribution might not have ended black poverty, but it might well have curbed the power of the Southern elite...

...On the other hand, in "redeemed" Georgia, the 1876 "disaffection" among rice workers was, as one planter put it, "nipped in the bud by the Negroes being made to understand that a company of soldiers was ready at a moment's notice in Savannah...

...Indeed, despite its subtitle, Nothing but Freedom has little to say about emancipation in the United States...