Based on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this book aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in "the peculiar institution."
Chapter 1. “The Faithful Slave”
Chapter 6. The Feel of Freedom: Moving About
Chapter 7. Back to Work: The Old Compulsions
Chapter 8. Back to Work: The New Dependency
Chapter 9. The Gospel and the Primer
Selected Bibliography and Manuscript Sources