Gendered Slavery and the Dawn of Freedom in the Deep South

Abstract

In recent years the literature about the transition from slavery and freedom in the United States during the tumultuous decades before and after the Civil War has greatly expanded our understanding of African American history. Steven Hahn's study A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2004) reveals how rural folk, slaves and freed people, became politicized during slavery and participated in the political life of the former Confederacy during Reconstruction and afterwards. Melvin Patrick Ely's examination of Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (2004) details how a group of slaves, manumitted in Virginia in 1810, settled on family tracts in what they called Israel Hill (after the Biblical Israelites escaping to the Promised Land), and how they lived and worked in the midst of a slave society. A number of other books by Daina Ramey Berry, David Cecelski, Patricia Click, Paul A. Cimbala, Sally Hadden, Tera Hunter, Wilma King, Stephanie McCurry, Nell Painter, and Dylan Penningroth, among others, have provided new perspectives to a variety of topics concerning slaves and free blacks as well as freedmen and freedwomen.1