Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Land Ownership , and: The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy After the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS91 Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Bhck Land Ownership. By Claude F. Oubre. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Pp. xvii, 212. $12.95.) The Roots of Bhck Poverty: The Southern Phntation Economy After the Civil War. Jay R. Mandle. (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1978. Pp. xvi, 141. $8.75.) Exceedingly different in historical method and intellectual outlook, these two books nevertheless present similar findings about the economic condition of emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Both argue that Southern blacks experienced change but relatively little progress in their objective economic circumstances as a result of emancipation. Taking the failure of Reconstruction as self-evident, Oubre explains this failure with reference to therefusal of thevictorious Union government to give land to die former slaves, while Mandle points to the underdeveloped nature of the Southern plantation economy as the chief cause of black poverty. Oubre's purpose is to discover whether concerted efforts were made to secure land for emancipated slaves. Presenting a seemingly exhaustive account which notes virtually every acre of land that came into the use or possession of blacks, he recounts the familiar story of wartime distribution of confiscated lands to blacks, the restoration of these lands under President Johnson, attempts by formerslaves to claim land under the Southern Homestead Act, and sundry efforts by blacks to acquire land apart from the provisions of thatstatute. A compendium of raw historical data more than a considered work of historical analysis, Forty Acres and a Mule nonetheless makes available a certain amount of useful information. We learn, for example, how many freedmen made entries under the Southern Homestead Act, how many received final certificates of title (about 1000 in five southern states), and where land acquisition by blacks was most frequent (Florida) . Oubre's unsurprising conclusion is that Congress, the President, military and federal officials, the Freedmen's Bureau, Northern whites, and the freedmen themselves all shared responsibility for the failure to distribute land during Reconstruction. But of course Congress and die President bear principal responsibility—the former becauseit was not committed to the idea that true freedom depended on economic independence, the latter because he really did not care about the freedmen's well being. Mandle seeks to explain why incomes of Southern blacks were disproportionately low compared to incomes of other groups in American society after the Civil War. His answer is that blacks were locked into an underdeveloped economy still dominated by the plantation. Taking issue with the long established view that a new class of businessmen came to power in the South following the defeat of die Confederacy, Mandle argues that the plantation economy and the planter class were not destroyed by the war, but on the contrary survived and remained in power in the manner of Caribbean plantation 92CIVIL WAR HISTORY economies. Yet the plantation economy, a mode of production distinct from feudal and capitalistic society and characterized by paternalistic culture and social organization, did not survive unchanged. Chattel slavery as a system of labor control gave way to the labor contract and sharecropping. Paternalism and the force and violence that sustained it continued, but in modified and weakened form. And ultimately it was not paternalistic repression that kept blacks in the thrall of poverty, Mandle concludes, but rather the exclusion of blacks from alternative employment outside the plantation economy in other parts of the country. Things changed and the plantation economy broke down only when blacks got the chance to migrate North during World War I and World War II. Mandle presents his work as a contribution to Marxist social science, and although this theoretical concern gives the book a flatulent quality, non-Marxist scholars will find the author's discussion of the plantation economy as a mode of production informative and useful. Moreover Mandle's central argument for continuity in the survival of the planter class forms an important contribution to the present debate about the nature of the postwar southern political economy. Oubre's book in contrast, preoccupied as it is with discrete facts, is less intellectually satisfying because it is totally devoid not only ofanything resemblingan original interpretation or insight, but of...