The
concept of social and economic rights was almost nonexistent a
century ago. Political rights, however, without economic security
could be a mere abstraction. Meaningful freedom had to be more
than the freedom to starve. This meant that the ex-slave needed
land, tools, and training to provide him with an economic base
that would make his freedom real. The ex-slave had limited
education, limited experience, a servile slave attitude, and he
was in need of social and economic training to compensate for the
years of slavery. Without this he could not enter a competitive
society as an equal. Emancipation was not enough.
Most slaves had been engaged in plantation agriculture and were
destined to continue in some kind of farm work. Sumner and
Stevens led the fight in Congress to provide each of them with
forty acres and a mule, and this would have provided the basis
for their developing into an independent class of farmers.
However, they were doomed to remain a subservient mass of
peasants. The prewar slave plantation was replaced by sharecropping,
tenant farming, and the convict lease system.
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