Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia

Abstract

At one point in Claiming Freedom, Karen Cook Bell tells the story of Dandy Stewart and a group of former slaves who returned to abandoned rice fields on Butler's Island, Georgia, after the Civil War. An incalculable amount of violence, horror, and suffering occurred on Butler's Island slave plantations, yet Stewart returned. His journey back, according to Bell, “mirrored the decision of other former slaves in the Georgia low country to return to ambiguous sites where kinship and community coexisted with their pain and suffering” (p. 51). Stewart's story illustrates Bell's wider argument that the pursuit of kinship, land, political rights, and economic independence in Georgia's low country meant that “African Americans maintained an expansive vision of freedom”; their fights for freedom built impregnable community bonds to navigate through decades of slavery, racism, violence, and the unmet promises of Reconstruction (p. 4). Concentrating on the Georgia counties of Camden, Chatham, Glynn, Liberty, and McIntosh, Bell's study explores 150 years of history, including the transatlantic slave trade, plantation life, slave community, rice economy, self-emancipation, land acquisition, political participation, and the forging of African American self-contained communities into the Jim Crow era. Drawing on newspapers, oral histories, tax records, land deeds, labor contracts, and local, state, and federal government sources, Bell thoroughly documents the lives and patterns of Georgia low country men and women. She begins in the eighteenth century, where she sets up her most important historiographical contribution. The idea of “oppositional communities” is not new, but Bell takes it into new and important directions. Bell defines oppositional communities having originated during slavery as “communities of resistance that were based on shared transatlantic pasts … linked by regional origins, American destinations, and New World cultural developments” (pp. 1–2). Modes of resistance included running away, maintaining personal gardens, and developing their own language, Gullah-Geechee. Over time, Bell contends, oppositional communities grew in number, power, and influence, and after emancipation they became the foundation to freedom. During slavery, African Americans came to view land ownership as the most important condition of true independence. Then, during Reconstruction, oppositional communities did all they could to secure land from the federal government, and while many succeeded, the policies ultimately failed. African Americans were left on their own to secure land. And they continued to do so, as Bell provides story after story of men and women fighting for land and freedom.