Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-12, Section: A, page: 4564.

Adviser: David Montgomery.

This study focuses on the cotton plantations along the Tar River in Nash, Edgecombe, Pitt, and Beaufort counties in eastern North Carolina. It begins with the capture of "Little Washington" and the other coastal towns of North Carolina, by Union forces, in 1862, and ends, in 1902, with the exclusion of blacks from the state's Republican party after disfranchisement.

Between the fall of Washington and the expulsion of black Republicans, this study analyzes the destruction of slavery; the struggle to define the freedom of the former slaves; the "Redemption" of the state in the early 1870s; the construction of a new "free" labor system on the foundation of The County Government Law and The Landlord and Tenant Act (both passed in 1876); the great emigrations of black workers to the old Southwest in the late decades of the nineteenth century; the attempt at a class and racial realignment, through a fusion politics, in the 1890s; and the triumph of "white supremacy" at the turn of the century.

This a study of race, labor, and politics in a former slave society. As a consequence of the slavery experience, agricultural labor on the Tar River was defined in racial terms, and slavery was always the point of reference. Much, but not all, agricultural labor revolved around sharecropping, which started out as a reasonable facsimile of independence but quickly evolved into a form of indentured servitude. Much of the motivation for "Redemption" was to give the traditional elite more control over "free" labor. One of the basic assumptions of the study is that politics is not an end in itself, but primarily a means to economic advantage.