Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in Lowcountry South Carolina

Abstract

The wave of strikes that swept across the South Carolina rice fields in late 1876 offer rich material for revisiting the most compelling issues in the postwar Reconstruction of the US's former slave states. They expose sharp tensions between the Republican Party's black, working-class constituency and its mostly white, bourgeois leadership. Recent studies, based almost entirely on Northern published opinion, have made the case that Northern Republican elites were driven to “abandon the mid-century vision of an egalitarian free labor society” by assertive ex-slaves oblivious to the “mutual interests” that ostensibly bound them and their employers. This article, based on extensive archival research, asserts that similar fissures opened up between freedpeople and southern Republican officials. In a series of highly effective mobilizations against local planters and determined attempts to block party officials from betraying their interests, rice fieldhands demonstrated a clear understanding of the critical issues at stake during the months leading up to the collapse of Reconstruction. Their intervention contrasted not only with the feeble holding operation pursued by moderates in the upper levels of the Republican party, but also with the timidity of many locally rooted black officials nearer to the grassroots.