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Abstract
This dissertation explores the centrality of landed property in African American thought between the American Civil War and the end of the Second World War. Land is rarely understood to be fundamental to our practice of freedom in the twenty-first century. In the post-emancipation moment, however, the formerly enslaved people of the South and their allies believed that freedom was impossible without property in land. This dissertation asks two related questions with the hope of shedding light on the costs of losing that conception of freedom: what did landownership mean to freedpeople in the post-emancipation period? Did these meanings challenge emerging power structures in the period? This dissertation recovers historical reasons for attending to the material conditions of freedom in contexts beyond the mid-nineteenth century. I show that the focus on land in African American thought amounted to a two-level analysis of post-slavery domination. On one level, freedpeople believed that they needed to possess land so that they could experience privacy, cultivate economic self-reliance, and build communities. On another level, the land question served as an access point to think about the unequal relationships that pervaded post-emancipation life. From this perspective, land was a necessary fixture of public discussion because patterns of land ownership reflected social and political relations. Across the chapters of the dissertation, I identify four relational practices that the African American quest for land embodied: privacy, confiscation, reclamation, and cooperation. The dissertation is organized into five chapters. In Chapter One I provide an overview of the freedpeople’s desire for land. I show how the freedpeople’s conceptual linking of landed property and freedom initiated a longstanding debate in African American thought about the possibility and conditions necessary to practice freedom after slavery. I also consider the entanglement of the idea of grounded freedom with broader ideas about settler citizenship. In Chapter Two I explore a major reason that freedpeople wanted ownership of land: to establish homes. With a reading of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I show how private property in the home enabled black enclosure and white exclusion. Chapter Three examines Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’s Reconstruction Era plan to confiscate and redistribute planter land. Stevens answered the question, how can freedpeople obtain property in homes, but he failed to muster a winning coalition. In Chapter Four, I move beyond Reconstruction to think about the afterlife of grounded freedom. Pauline Hopkins’s 1902 magazine novel, Winona, portrays abolition as a political project that resisted control over land, while also celebrating the reclamation of rightful inheritance. I highlight resonances between African American thought and indigenous thought in their aspiration for reclamation. The final chapter tracks W.E.B. Du Bois’s turn toward cooperative organization in the twentieth century. While Du Bois briefly discards the idea that African American freedom depends on land ownership, he returns to an endorsement of cooperative ownership of land in the 1940s. Attuned to the transformation in economic production, Du Bois argued that land was still valuable in the twentieth century for the historical meaning attached to it. These four episodes in African American history offer us lessons on the continued importance of land in our present world. Though freedom does not necessarily require land as a material condition, the quest for land contributed to a struggle against white domination that continues today.