In Nothing but Freedom, Eric Foner compares slave societies, including Haiti, the British West Indies, and the American South, and their process of emancipation. Foner devotes the first chapter of his book to discuss Haiti and the British West Indies in order to juxtapose these slave societies with the American South. Foner notes that by analyzing emancipation in other settings in order to illuminate the American experience, certain patterns stand out. Foner describes these patterns as “the effort to create a dependent labor force, the ideological conflict over changing definitions of labor and property, the impact of metropolitan policies, the place of the society in the larger world economy, and the uses of state in bolstering the plantation regime” (38). In both the Caribbean and the American South, emancipation raised the interrelated question of labor control and access to economic resources (43). In both, whites, determined to maintain the plantation system post-emancipation, obsessed over labor and attempted to prevent freedmen from leaving the plantations. For example, throughout the Caribbean, taxation was employed to “limit the freedmen’s access to land, to restrict the economic progress of the peasantry, and to induce blacks to labor for wages” (25). Similarly, in the American South, the solution to the labor problem was the system of sharecropping, which “evolved out of an economic struggle in which planters were able to prevent blacks from gaining access to land” in order to force blacks to remain on plantations (45). Furthermore, the American South attempted to create a dependent labor force by encouraging immigration. As in the Caribbean, many planters “concluded that indentured servants would admirably meet this need” and the West Indies experimented with Indian, “coolie,” labor to meet this labor shortage (47). Thus, the state interfered in order to support the plantation system. In addition, Southern states passed the Black Codes in an attempt to create a labor system, which could be enforced by the state (49). With Redemption, the state again stepped forward as an instrument of labor control. The right to property and the terms of credit were redefined during Redemption in the interest of the planter class. Foner concludes, “As in the Caribbean, American freedman adopted an interpretation of the implications of emancipation rather different from that of their former masters” (44). For blacks, the desire for land “reflected the recognition that, whatever its limitations, land ownership ensured the freedmen a degree of control over the time and labor of themselves and their families” (44). For example, following emancipation in Haiti, the rise of a black peasantry occurred, centered on this idea of freedom from the plantations and autonomy. Furthermore, Foner notes “like their Caribbean counterparts, southern freedman did not believe the end of slavery should mean a diminution of either the privileges or level of income they had enjoyed as slaves” (57). This essentially amounted to the right of subsistence. Conflicts over the legal definition of contract rights and property relations are familiar legacies of emancipation in both the Caribbean and the American South. For example, the matter of fencing was an explosive political issue in parts of the South because it “directly involved the laborer’s access to economic resources and alternative means of subsistence” (62). Plantation owners attempted to prevent freedmen from grazing their livestock on privately owned lands. Similarly in the West Indies, customary property rights no longer applied; rather, “if blacks wanted access to the provision grounds, they must pay for the privilege” (19). Essentially, the ultimate similarity between the post-emancipation experiences of these slave societies was the legal code and government policies were modeled with one idea in mind: “to maintain the plantation economy” (24).
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