Rebecca Scott’s Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (2005) examines the postemancipation struggles faced by people of African descent in Cuba and the United States. More specifically, Scott traces the challenges freedpeople confronted as they tried to enter civic life, gain economic independence, and achieve public respect. Her main objective is to understand how two similar slave systems evolved “over time into dramatically different end states” (6). In other words, how did these slave societies adopt such different approaches to the questions of citizenship and labor following emancipation? To answer this question, Scott builds on the historical tradition of the comparative study of slavery and emancipation (similar to works such as Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom, Peter Kolchin’s Unfree Labor, and David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage).
Scott’s first chapter examines the similarities between sugar plantation slavery in Cuba and the United States. “Louisiana and Cuba,” Scott writes, “shared markets, technologies, and a bedrock reliance on coercive labor systems marked by brutality” (27). In other words, these two slave systems were fundamental similar, and only different “at the edges” (27). The major differences between these two regions developed after emancipation. In the United States, the Civil War was fought, for the large part, in defense of slavery. During Reconstruction, the emancipation of slaves opened new doors for the struggles over political and economic power in the postbellum South. Following the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, Scott argues, “the question of the structure of work, authority, and access to resources remained altogether up in the air” (37). Freedpeople’s access to resources such as land, wages, and ballots presented a bevy of new challenges for whites, blacks, and the United States government.
Scott ardently argues that these “new challenges” all stemmed from the central issue of labor relations and the “emerging debate over the definition and prerogatives of citizenship” (39). For Scott, the prerogative of citizenship was directly connected to the issue of labor. W.E.B. Du Bois makes a similar argument in Black Reconstruction. He illustrated a close relationship between freedpeople understanding of politics and labor. He asserted, “They were beginning, more and more clearly, to see that their vote must be used for their economic betterment, and that their right to work and their income depended upon their use of the ballot” (Du Bois, 361). Although Du Bois and Scott agree about the connection between labor and politics, Scott does not goes as far as Du Bois, who argued that the white and black labor movements were in “singularly contradictory positions” (Du Bois, 359). Instead, Scott demonstrates that the Louisiana backwoods’ labor force (including both whites and blacks) was engaged in “intimate interaction…vestiges of the more Caribbean pattern of social relations that had characterized French and Spanish Louisiana” (74). Following the presidential election of 1876, however, white leaders and politicians began to systematically strip away the significant gains made by freedpeople (politically or economically), which forced them into wage or contractual slavery.
Cuba, in many ways, demonstrated the inverted image of the United States’ Reconstruction. While fighting for independence, Cuban slaves’ involvement with the independence movement coupled with the growing support for abolition undermined this despicable labor system. “Even [Cuban] racists,” Scott notes, “had staked their claims…on the grounds of transracial patriotism” (252). In this section, Scott brings the United States and Cuban narratives together. She uses anecdotes about black Louisianans fighting against the Spanish military in Cuba. The quick U.S. victory over Spain and subsequent occupation of Cuba, however, brought unforeseen consequences. African American volunteers witnessed the interracial cooperation and lack of racism (although racism was still somewhat present) in the Cuba population. This, in turn, emboldened African Americans on their return home, where the contrast between Cuba and the American South became even more evident. Scott concludes that the failure to achieve an interracial class structure in the United States locked “inequality into Louisiana’s World of cane,” while the cross-racial alliances in Cuba opened up opportunities for equality.
In her final chapter, Scott concludes that Cuba and the United States took divergent paths because “Cuba’s expanding economy drew in immigrants and smallholders from the countryside, ensuring a multiracial workforce; Louisiana employers had less to offer and relied on subordinate black laborers” (264). True enough, but as we will see in the coming weeks, Moon-Ho Jung’s Coolies and Cane will challenge this assumption. Jung definitely sees a more diverse labor force in Louisiana, which might call Scott’ conclusion into question. Nevertheless, Rebecca Scott’s Degrees of Freedom demonstrates that central question/conflict for postemancipation societies deals with questions of labor. Who will replace the slave laborer? Immigrants? Freedpeople? Poor whites? Scott’s monograph also raises new questions about Reconstruction and the issue of labor: How separated were blacks and whites following Reconstruction (especially compared to how W.E.B. Du Bois and his followers have argued)? How important was labor to the notions of citizenship, and vice versa? How different was labor relations in backwoods societies versus urbanized societies? I will hopefully address these questions as I move forward with my project.
Any suggestions for further reading are welcomed!