The Landscape of Freedom

Slaveholders in the South, whether they owned two hundred or ten slaves, viewed themselves as independent.

As planters or yeoman farmers, they were self-supporting with no one to answer to except themselves.

In the period after the Revolutionary War, independence based on landholding and slave ownership served as the foundation of Southern society.

In an odd dichotomy, the planters considered liberty their god given right, while turning a blind eye to the brutal enslavement of Africans.

Planters presided over households of dependents, wives, daughters and sons, including their slaves. As paternalists, the white planter elite saw themselves bound by duty and burden, which however self-serving and self-deceiving constituted the rock on which the slaveholder's ideology, morality, and self image had had to be built.

This point of view toward the world and toward themselves served them well so long as they held power, but it betrayed them when war and emancipation allowed the blacks - the object of this paternalism - to speak openly for themselves.

For slaveholders, the Civil War was a battle to preserve their way of life and privileges. The Confederate States of America sought to construct a government that would nurture the liberty they held so dear.

With the approach of Union troops, the enslaved began to runaway in ever increasing numbers leaving their owners in shock and disbelief. In response to the number of runaways, slaveholders attempted to implement impenetrable boundaries denying either ingress or egress. These efforts failed and as the war dragged on, slaves became increasingly unruly.

Despite the efforts at containment, thousands of slaves found their way North. At home, slavery dissolved as the news of the Union victories and their triumph over the Confederacy slowly filtered south.

Despite war weariness and the general demoralization of slave labor, pro-slavery ideology survived. While the planters were defeated, they still believed that black labor was only possible through coercion.

Adjustment to a system of free labor was difficult for many of the planters in the Low Country to accept. A number of plantations across the Low Country survived but their landscapes were altered forever.

Without coerced labor rice was no longer a viable staple crop. Many of the former planters turned to phosphate mining or sold their property to wealthy Northerners for use as hunting lodges.

For the newly emancipated slaves, the former rival geographies, which were part of the landscape of the slavery, provided the opportunity for a black public sphere.

This would be severely tested, for in the post- emancipation South, although no longer enslaved African Americans were denied freedom.

Attempts to establish economic autonomy and claim full civil and political rights by African Americans met fierce resistance from white southerners.

In 1876, the federal government abandoned Reconstruction leaving African Americans at the mercy of southerners, embittered at the lose of the political economy of slavery.

By the turn of the century, African Americans were disenfranchised and as the result of Jim Crow Laws would remain segregated well into the twentieth century.

With a low wage economy the South was the most economically and socially deprived region in the country.

African Americans refused to accept the subservient role whites tried to ascribe to them even though whites owned most of the land and consciously stifled black economic development.

At every opportunity, African Americans sought to advance themselves, maintain their families, and uplift their race. The Landscape of Freedom would not become a reality until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.