The dissertation examines the social dimensions of slaves' transition to agricultural wage laborers in South Carolina from Union occupation of the coastal islands south of St. Helena Sound early during the Civil War through the inauguration of the state's first Republican administration in 1868. The analysis of wartime and postwar labor disputes devotes special attention to struggles between freedmen's sense of collectivity and the order of private property, individualisn, and wage labor that attended emancipation.

Interpretation of the regional struggles that surrounded the reorganization of agricultural production under a free labor regimen draws principally upon federal civil and military records, supplemented by family papers of planters and farmers, contemporary newspapers, and state archival records. The archival collections provided a rich documentary source from which to examine work arrangements as an arena in which contested relations of power and authority rather than abstract market imperatives shaped the evolution of wage labor.

Landowners' constraints on subsistence production, at times violent restrictions of local marketing, and an increasing seasonalization of agricultural employment impeded freedmen's attempts to establish either labor rents or share wages as forms of tenancy. Popular efforts to coordinate laborers' control of the terms of agricultural employment became a more enduring focus of former slaves' collective action than their putatively universal demand for forty acres and a mule. New principles of community organization that broke down the localism of slave life and novel demands to cultivate, process, and market shares of the harvested crop emerged simultaneously, driven forward by the revolution in property rights that accompanied the introduction of wage labor. Through the agency of quasi-military regulatory associations, freedmen mounted public campaigns to regulate wage rates and to establish rental tenures. At the onset of Radical Reconstruction, freedmen's advancing labor movement rejected planters' belief that payment of wages for labor left workers no other claim to the crop their toil had produced and asserted that the wage earners' property in labor entitled workers alone to place a value on their labor. The claims not only repudiated the personal sovereignty that had constituted the essence of the slaveowner's prerogative. The demands also subverted entrepreneurial claims that subjection to management and to the discipline of a competitive labor market constituted freedom.