Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell John David Smith Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Karen Cook Bell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. xii, 161 pp. $39.99. ISBN 978-1-6111-7830-2. In 1903 the great African American historian and sociologist W.E. Burghardt Du Bois took stock of the conditions of life for the rural South's black proletariat. Writing "Of the Dawn of Freedom," Du Bois considered the failure of the U.S. government to confiscate land belonging to the defeated Confederates in 1865 both a broken promise and a missed opportunity. "It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters,—a sort of poetic justice, said some." But no, Du Bois complained bitterly, "the vision of 'forty acres and a mule'—the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder," became little more than a pipe dream (The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches [New York, 1903, reprint 2018], 22, 27). Economists, historians, and sociologists have long agreed with Du Bois, keenly aware of the deleterious long-term legacy of the failure of Reconstruction-era governments to compensate the South's freed-people both with land and the means to transform it into productive property. Denied land, most of the freedmen and women ultimately became farm tenants or worked on shares for white landholders. Frequently, black persons became mired in the web of neoslavery—fastened securely to the white man's land by debt, sparse capital, and illiteracy. Without land, the freedpeople lacked opportunities to build communities, to invest capital, and to leave property to their heirs. Over a century and a half African Americans have suffered markedly from generational poverty, leaving black persons at a distinct disadvantage when competing with white persons for education, housing, and jobs. Although "Forty Acres and a Mule" continues as a rallying cry for reparationists and polemicists, numerous scholars, including Edward Magdol and Claude F. Oubre, have made clear that General William [End Page 152] T. Sherman's famous January 1865 Special Field Order 15 never was intended to award land fee simple to the freedpeople. At best it was the general's short-term strategy to alleviate what he considered the military problem of dealing with the burden of thousands of freedpeople in his army's midst. Despite the assertion in Sherman's Special Field Order that freedpeople in what became known as the "Sherman Reserve" would be granted homesteads, the land provision in the March 1865 Freedmen's Bureau Act made clear that the freedpeople could occupy and rent—but not receive as reparation—up to forty acres of abandoned and occupied land for three years. The refugees could purchase the land based on whatever fee simple titles could be secured. Historian Karen Cook Bell's most welcome Claiming Freedom focuses on slavery, emancipation, the government's failed land policy, and the broad meaning of gender, kinship networks, and land ownership in the rice-producing portion of the Sherman Reserve—five counties in the Georgia lowcountry, extending from Savannah to St. Mary's. Drawing on varied sources, including the Southern Claims Commission papers, as well as local deeds and probate records, she examines how black persons in these counties shaped "oppositional communities" and established "complex networks of relations and tensions that were the products of contradictory and competing visions of freedom" (2). The Civil War and its accompanying uncompensated emancipation initiated in Georgia and the other Confederate states "a social, political, and economic revolution," Bell writes, eroding "the tension between slavery, free labor, and modernity" (52). Bell first assesses slavery in the Georgia lowcountry, largely confirming extant interpretations of the institution's complexities, contradictions, and diversity. She credits the task system with offering the lowcountry bondspeople degrees of freedom and an early grasp of the meaning of private property and land-based communities. That said, Bell revises previous scholarship by arguing that slaves who labored at tasks neither were "privileged" bondspeople nor were...