ABSTRACT
A t the close of the civil war, four million newly emancipated slaves entered a second-class status situated somewhere between actual liberty and slavery. They joined the ambiguous social and legal space occupied by one-half million blacks who had been nominally free before the war. African Americans as a group and their white allies in the North understood that without black property and voting rights, the Emancipation Proclamation had no functional meaning either for black Americans or for American democracy. Political citizenship for African-American men was theoretically achieved, of course, when Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. But within the next quarter-century those victories were rescinded as, state by state, the South disenfranchised black voters near the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, with respect to economic security, the freedpeople received no financial reparations for two and one third centuries of bondage. In particular, Congress refused to confiscate farmlands from supporters of the former Confederacy, who were perceived as a competent managerial elite, for distribution to the freedmen, who were viewed as uneducated laborers without any experience as independent farmers. Simultaneously, the federal government refused to make financial loans to plantation owners so that the war-ravaged South could reconstitute its economy on a sound basis.
