ABSTRACT
Amid an increasing bevy of spectacular historical and political analyses of race in southern society after the Civil War, Woodruff makes another splendid contribution. While taking the apt metaphor of the Belgian Congo, Woodruff documents the horrific violence that accompanied the post-war transition that ultimately resulted in the share-cropping system of virtual peonage for the newly freed Blacks. This analysis is based on perhaps the best-case example of the interplay between the races as Blacks struggled to find their footing in the post-emancipation South. The setting in the Mississippi Delta is within the “fertile crescent” of the old Confederacy, with its pretensions to an agricultural aristocracy. The population of African descendants constituted an overwhelming majority on the land and was almost its entire labor force after the war and into the early twentieth century. So the major questions at this interval were: how could the plantation owners survive the loss of their free labor force and how could the “new” free men and women sustain themselves selling their labor at a fair price. It is this puzzle that animates Woodruff in the study.
