Workforce and Land

The legacies of slavery in the Americas were shaped not only by how slavery was once structured but also by how the end of slavery evolved and the paths taken by these societies following emancipation.

Sugar and coffee production not only declined but also encountered competition from the Brazilian and Cuban sugar industries that continued to rely on slaves until the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the freed population pursued better wages and working conditions and rejected toiling for meager salaries. In Antigua, for example, freedpersons who managed to acquire land invested their time working on their own new plots.⁶ In Jamaica, freedpeople refused to work for the large landowners, who in turn promoted old stereotypes of Black populations as lazy and unfit to work.⁷ Unable to force newly emancipated men and women to work for their old owners, British officials made unsuccessful attempts to attract white laborers from England and Ireland. The eventual solution was to introduce indentured workers from China, India, and Africa into the British West Indies.

There were similar developments in the French West Indies. In Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, which also remained French colonies, former bondspeople left the plantations after 1848. But as no official measures to redistribute land to them were implemented, few peasants succeeded in acquiring their own plots.⁸ Moreover, using the excuse of preventing vagrancy, the French colonial government set repressive measures to restrain the mobility of newly emancipated people.

Foreseeing the end of slavery and the need to gradually replace the enslaved workforce, Spain also introduced Chinese indentured laborers in Cuba from 1840 to 1878.¹¹ After the end of slavery, the Cuban context presented some elements in common with the French and British colonies in the West Indies. The island remained under Spanish control until the end of the nineteenth century, and overall, few freedpeople became landowners. Because the sugarcane industry had expanded on the island and was oriented toward the North American market, land became increasingly concentrated in the hands of large landowners.

In the United States, attempts to address the problem of workforce shortage that resulted from the end of slavery and from the trail of death caused by four years of the Civil War included coercive measures, such as the passage of Black Codes in Southern states from 1865 to 1866. Drawing on older slave codes, these laws were designed to restrict Black people’s mobility by using criminal charges of vagrancy. This legislation also contributed to the expansion of the existing system of convict leasing. Therefore, the imposition of penal labor on any Black or white individuals serving time in prison expanded in Southern states such as Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and North Carolina to make up for the slave labor shortage. Vagrancy laws and convict leasing supported the incarceration of freedmen and freedwomen, who hence provided unpaid labor in farms, factories, railroads, and construction projects, especially in the South but also in the North.¹² African Americans fought these measures, just as they had resisted the atrocities of the period of slavery.

Land ownership was also a central topic of abolitionist debates in the United States and remained an issue in the years that followed emancipation. Already during the first two years of the Civil War, the Union had taken official action to confiscate property from the Confederates, including land. All these measures were doomed to failure. In 1865, by the end of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman issued an order that appropriated nearly 400,000 acres of land belonging to Confederate planters along the Atlantic coast from South Carolina to Florida to be redistributed among the freed population. In addition, before the final abolition of slavery in 1865, the fourth section of the “Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees” created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, later known simply as the Freedmen’s Bureau, and projected the distribution of abandoned lands to freedpeople.¹³ As part of this process, the government allocated land that could be rented during a three-year period. Following the measure, nearly forty thousand freedpeople settled on this territory and started growing crops.

Sadly, not only was this policy not expanded, but in 1865 President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded President Lincoln after Lincoln’s assassination, pardoned the Confederate landowners and revoked the Freedmen’s Bureau’s order redistributing land confiscated during the war to former slaves.¹⁴ Despite resistance, former slaveholders succeeded in expelling thousands of families of freedpeople from the previously confiscated estates. Next, the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 made available approximately forty-seven million acres of public land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi to be sold in lots of eighty acres to freedpeople and loyal white people. Here again, white people acquired most of the land. In the following years, many newly emancipated men and women lost the lands they had originally been able to purchase.¹⁵