Book Review

In Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, the author, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, examines the postwar political economy of the "old dominion" through the experience of Virginia's emancipated tobacco workers. In the postwar decades, the social relations of production in the dark-leaf tobacco fields of eastern Virginia were only gradually released from slavery's deep imprint, and then only to be increasingly and profoundly shaped by the uneven but certain advent of global capitalism. It is the postemancipation transformation of Virginia's tobacco economy and its relationship to broader issues of historical change in the late-nineteenth-century South that Kerr-Ritchie best illustrates in this well-researched and strongly argued study.

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Opening with only a brief glimpse into slavery and its wartime destruction, the book quickly turns to what Kerr-Ritchie describes as the scattered and splintered struggles by freedpeople to define free labor prior to 1867. He finds that enfranchisement collectivized freedpeople's efforts to shape the meaning of freedom; in 1867 tobacco country freedmen elected their representatives to the constitutional convention and gained a greater voice for land redistribution. But political and workplace violence, the victory of Virginia conservatives at the polls, and the decline of federal Reconstruction threatened a resurgence of planter dominion. Still, freedpeople had effectively challenged slavery's persisting impact; "the price of freedom," asserts Kerr-Ritchie, "was a decline in agricultural production that was particularly significant with labor-intensive tobacco production," which he terms the "freedom crop index."

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