page_922 < previous page page_922 next page > Page 922 rights laws, segregation was also the rule in many public facilities and private businesses. Almost all the new public school systems educated black and white children in separate schools, and many railroads, hotels, and theaters either excluded blacks altogether or relegated them to inferior accommodations. But the polity was color-blind. Blacks and whites sat together on juries, school boards, and city councils, and the Republican party provided a meeting ground for like-minded men of both races. Politics and government were the most integrated institutions in southern life during Reconstruction. The appalling loss of life in the Civil War, and the widespread destruction of work animals, farm buildings, and machinery, ensured that the South's economic revival would be slow and painful. Between 1860 and 1870, while farm output expanded in the rest of the nation, the South experienced precipitous declines in the value of farm land, the number of farm animals, and the amount of acreage under cultivation. But economic reconstruction required more than rebuilding shattered farms and repairing broken bridges. An entire social order had been swept away, and on its ruins a new one had to be constructed. In the postwar South, as in every nineteenth-century society that abolished slavery, emancipation was followed by a comprehensive struggle over access to the land and the forging of a new labor system. The conflict between former masters aiming to re-create a disciplined labor force and blacks seeking to carve out the greatest degree of economic autonomy helped shape the transition from slave to free labor. Planters were convinced that their own survival and the region's prosperity depended on their ability to resume production using disciplined gang labor, as under slavery. It was an article of faith that the freedmen, naturally indolent, would work only under compulsion. When they found that their personal authority over black laborers had vanished, planters turned to the new state governments of Presidential Reconstruction, which enacted the Black Codes in an unsuccessful attempt to stabilize the plantation labor force. To blacks, economic autonomy rested on ownership of land. Many freedmen in 1865 and 1866 refused to sign labor contracts, expecting the federal government to provide them with farms of their own, to which their past labor, they believed, entitled them. In some localities, as an Alabama overseer reported, they "set up claims to the plantation and all on it." But President Andrew Johnson in the summer of 1865 ordered land in federal hands to be returned to its former owners. Most rural blacks remained propertyless and poor, as did those who flocked to southern towns and cities after the Civil War in an unsuccessful search for better employment opportunities. Most blacks were thus compelled to go to work as laborers on white-owned farms and plantations, although they continued to resist white supervision of their work routines and daily lives. Nearly all former slaves refused to work in gangs under an overseer's direction, and most preferred to rent land for a fixed payment rather than work for wages. Out of the conflict on the plantations, new systems of labor emerged in the different regions of the South. Sharecropping came to dominate the cotton South. A compromise between blacks' desire for land and planters' for labor discipline, sharecropping allowed each black family to work its own plot, with the crop divided with the landowner at year's end. In the rice kingdom of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, planters were unable to acquire the large amounts of capital necessary to repair irrigation systems and threshing machinery destroyed by the war, and blacks clung tenaciously to land they had occupied in 1865. In the end, the great plantations fell to pieces, and blacks were able to acquire small parcels of land and take up self-sufficient farming. In the Louisiana sugar region, gang labor survived the end of slavery, with blacks paid wages and allowed access to garden plots to grow their own food. In all these cases, blacks' economic opportunities were limited by whites' control of credit and by the vagaries of a world market in which the price of agricultural goods suffered a prolonged decline. In the late 1860s, some blacks managed to accumulate enough money to move from sharecropper to renter, and a few pur- Â < previous page page_922 next page >