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Black Laborers, the Republican Party, and the Crisis of Reconstruction in Lowcountry South Carolina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2006

Brian Kelly
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Abstract

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The wave of strikes that swept across the South Carolina rice fields in late 1876 offer rich material for revisiting the most compelling issues in the postwar Reconstruction of the US's former slave states. They expose sharp tensions between the Republican Party's black, working-class constituency and its mostly white, bourgeois leadership. Recent studies, based almost entirely on Northern published opinion, have made the case that Northern Republican elites were driven to “abandon the mid-century vision of an egalitarian free labor society” by assertive ex-slaves oblivious to the “mutual interests” that ostensibly bound them and their employers. This article, based on extensive archival research, asserts that similar fissures opened up between freedpeople and southern Republican officials. In a series of highly effective mobilizations against local planters and determined attempts to block party officials from betraying their interests, rice fieldhands demonstrated a clear understanding of the critical issues at stake during the months leading up to the collapse of Reconstruction. Their intervention contrasted not only with the feeble holding operation pursued by moderates in the upper levels of the Republican party, but also with the timidity of many locally rooted black officials nearer to the grassroots.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , December 2006 , pp. 375 - 414
Copyright
2006 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Footnotes

I completed the early research for this article during my tenure as Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2003–2004 and wish to acknowledge the generous support of the NHC and its staff. Thanks are also due to the British Academy, which funded the archival research required for this work, and to Stephen Tuck, who arranged an opportunity to present a preliminary draft to the American History Research Seminar at Oxford University. I am especially grateful to Jennifer Kelly and Dave Brannigan, who chased down some of the loose research threads from across the Atlantic, and to those scholars who offered critical comments on an earlier draft: Bruce Baker, William McKee Evans, Harold S. Forsythe, Suzanne Cameron Linder Hurley, Susan O'Donovan, Stephen Kantrowitz, Nancy MacLean, David Montgomery, James Tuten and the anonymous readers at IRSH.