ocial and
economic rights was almost nonexistent a century ago. Political rights,
however, without economic security could be a mere abstraction.
Meaningful freedom had to be more than the freedom to starve. This meant
that the ex-slave needed land, tools, and training to provide him with an
economic base that would make his freedom real. The ex-slave had limited
education, limited experience, a servile slave attitude, and he was in
need of social and economic training to compensate for the years of
slavery. Without this he could not enter a competitive society as an
equal. Emancipation was not enough.

Most slaves had been engaged in plantation agriculture and were destined
to continue in some kind of farm work. Sumner and Stevens led the fight
in Congress to provide each of them with forty acres and a mule, and this
would have provided the basis for their developing into an independent
class of farmers. However, they were doomed to remain a subservient mass
of peasants. The prewar slave plantation was replaced by sharecropping,
tenant farming, and the convict lease system. In some cases the ex-slave
was provided with land, tools, and seed by plantation owner who, in turn,
was to get a share of the crop at the end of the season. His share was
always so large that the cropper remained permanently in his debt.
Similarly, tenant farmers paid rent for their land and were extended
loans by the store keeper for their provisions. Interest rates ran so
high that they too remained in permanent bondage. Finally, some
plantation owners leased convicts from the state and worked them in chain
gangs which most closely resembled the prewar slave system. In every
case, the result was that black farm laborers remained members of a
permanent peasant class.

The other hope for the advancement of the ex-slave was through the
development of industrial skills. At this time the American labor
movement was emerging and was striving to protect and elevate the status
of industrial workers. If the ex-slave had been integrated into this
movement, it would have helped many of them to achieve economic security.
At the same time, it would have strengthened the labor movement itself.
However, white workers usually saw blacks as job competitors rather than
as part of a mass labor alliance. In 1866 the National Labor Union
decided to organize black workers within its ranks, but by 1869 it was
urging colored delegates to its convention to form their