Joseph P. Reidy

Staple Crops as Windows into the World Where Slavery and Capitalism Once Coexisted

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a classic commentary on the state of African America at the dawn of the twentieth century, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois pondered the human relationships revealed by scattered ears of corn that he encountered along a rural road in Georgia. The corn, he discovered, had fallen from a mule-drawn wagon occupied by two black men who appeared oblivious to the loss. “To the car-window sociologist,” Du Bois explained, this indifference might seem rooted in shiftlessness. But by using the corn as a window into “the snarl of centuries,” he could see the unresolved tension between “master and man.” Economically and politically powerless, the men in the wagon could not see “why they should take unusual pains to make the white man’s land better, or to fatten his mule, or save his corn.”1 In the four books under review, the authors look through the window of agricultural commodities to understand the economic, political, social, and ultimately human relationships that characterized North American slavery. For Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert, the commodity is cotton; for Andrea Feeser, it is indigo; Kathleen Hilliard focuses on the products of the enslaved people’s internal economy.

From Great White Men to Blacks Emerging from Bondage, with Innovations in Documentary Editing@@@Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. The Black Military Experience.

Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, of which The Black Military Experience is the first published volume, is unique among the publications for which the historical profession is indebted to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). The Freedmen and Southern Society Project is not the only major historical undertaking sponsored by the Commission that departs from the traditional priority given records of the early Republic or papers of prominent leaders to focus upon the relatively inarticulate nonelite, but it departs farthest both in substance and in style and it has produced a book in print as distinct from a microform edition. Furthermore, Freedom grapples with a subject having no neat, definable boundaries. The editors have had to impose arbitrary limits. The seven-year timespan is a practical necessity rather than a chronological definition of the process of black emancipation. Documentation is drawn exclusively from the records of the National Archives, not because other sources would be irrelevant, but because those files are overwhelmingly rich beyond the capacity of any one scholar to explore, and because it would be impossible for even the most lavishly funded project to examine all manuscript collections of potential significance. Ira Berlin and his associates have culled more than 40,000 documents out of some two million examined in twenty-two record groups of the Archives. They plan eventually to make all 40,000 available on microfilm together with geographical and topical indexes. The collection will constitute a major source through which men and women generally mute, most especially black men and women, can henceforth speak in their own words to historians. The documents selected for letterpress publication will appear in five series of one or possibly more volumes each, The Black Military Experi-