Before dusk: Race, labor, and status in Louisiana, 1865--1900.

Abstract

According to Du Bois, race had been obvious in the nineteenth century, a matter of course. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century he was aware that despite everything, race lines were not fixed and fast. This dissertation asks how race was socially constructed in late nineteenth century America, and what about that construction was shifting at the turn of the century. I focus on the transition from slavery to sharecropping in the Deep South, specifically in Louisiana, between 1865, when slaves were emancipated, and 1900, by which point disfranchisement of black (and some white) voters had been completed and segregation firmly established in law. I argue that race was constructed as a social hierarchy built around relations of dependence through labor. Although wage labor replaced slavery, wage labor was itself conceived as a hierarchical relationship between persons, and not as an exchange of commodities between contractual equals. This conception of labor, as a relation of dependence, mediated the transition from antebellum relations between masters and slaves, already racialized, to those between postemancipation masters and servants. The resulting connections, among race, economic dependence, and citizenship were themselves undermined by a shift towards understanding wage labor as an exchange (labor power for wages) between contractual equals in the latter decades of the century.