Freemantown Research Guide

The 18 essays in this collection recognize not only a far greater African American presence in the highland South than was once assumed, but a wider variety of interaction between Black and white people during the 19th century. Of particular interest are Jennifer Lund Smith's essay "Negotiating the Terms of Freedom: The Quest for Education in an African American Community in Reconstruction North Georgia" and W. Fitzhugh Brundage's essay "Racial Violence, Lynching and Modernization in the Modern South."

An analysis of the transition African Americans experienced as they emerged from Civil War slavery, struggled through emancipation, and then forged on to become landowners during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period in the Georgia lowcountry. Karen Cook Bell's work is a bold study of the political and social strife of these individuals as they strived for and claimed freedom during the 19th century.

Slavery's Descendants brings together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America's racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation's histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all. Includes Karen Stewart-Ross's essay "Not a Wound Too Deep" research on her ancestors Jonas "Joe" Cathey and Delse Barry, who have both Freemantown & Possum Trot connections.

Examining how labor and economy shaped the family life of bondwomen and bondmen in the antebellum South Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the 19th century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed enslaved people more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into the internal lives of enslaved people through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.