Date of Award
Spring 5-3-2017
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History and American Studies
Department Chair or Program Director
O'Brien, Bruce
First Advisor
Ferrell, Claudine L
Major or Concentration
History
Abstract
Following emancipation, the freedmen began to seek out the highest expression of American conceptions of freedom: their own land. Because of the relationship between land and freedom, they focused their efforts on acquiring homesteads and farms that they could cultivate on their own terms. Southern landowners, however, quickly recognized that in order to recreate their antebellum social and economic positions, they would need a class of dependent laborers to maintain the plantation system which had been so immensely profitable for them before the war. In order to protect their own economic interests, they began to subvert the efforts of the freedmen to acquire economic independence. The insufficient response of northerners, the economic conditions of the South, the inadequacy of the Southern Homestead Act, and the persistent actions of southerners prevented the land reforms that the freed people and their allies desired and left most freedmen landless and dependent upon the class of people from whom they had only recently escaped bondage.
Recommended Citation
Hiser, Kristopher L., "Grounded Aspirations: The Freedmen's Struggle for Independence from the Planter Land Monopoly" (2017). Student Research Submissions. 153.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/153