Branches Without Roots

Book excerpt: The transition of blacks from slavery into the postwar free economy, and the inevitable reorganization of the plantation after the Civil War, were two of America's most profound transformations. How did the sharecropping system evolve, and how did it help maintain commercial agriculture after the war? What role did the emancipated slaves, their ex-masters, and the Freedmen's Bureau play in the reorganization of the southern economy? What were the effects of federal policy, the new market in free labor, and race and class conflict? Drawing on thousands of previously untapped sources and solid statistical evidence, Gerald David Jaynes fills the historical lacuna by presenting a new socioeconomic interpretation of the birth of the free black worker. "Branches Without Roots" explains how both southern planters and black workers, in light of the failure of Reconstruction politics, looked to the sharecropping system as a solution to their problems. The planters saw it has a way to sustain prewar production levels, and blacks attempted to use it as a viable economic base. Jaynes argues that it was the collective organization and self-help activities of the freedpeople and the democratic fever incited by black leaders and local agents of the Freedmen's Bureau that precipitated the agrarian revolution and the postbellum transformation of southern plantation. -- From publisher's description.