In Nothing But Freedom, Eric Foner compares and contrasts the post-emancipation experience of the American South with that of several other societies. He claims that
A rigid social and political dichotomy between former master and former slave, an ideology of racism, a dependent labor force with limited economic opportunities – these and other patterns seem always to survive the end of slavery, leading some theorists to minimize the consequences of emancipation altogether, positing instead an unchanging plantation structure in which slavery appears as simply one among a number of alternative labor systems (37).
What post-emancipation societies, at least Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the American South, all had in common, was an extreme opposition to redefining the region’s traditional economic structure. In all of these societies, the plantation system had been the norm, and those in power after emancipation refused to adapt and change it, even in the face of labor shortages, choosing instead to devise ways to coerce the new population of freedmen into conditions as similar to pre-existing systems of slavery as they could manage, or importing indentured servants, or “coolies,” from overseas.
In Haiti, emancipation was accomplished not through externally-imposed legislation, but through revolution by the blacks themselves. Yet after emancipation, black leader Toussaint L’Ouverture, “fearing the freedmen would not labor voluntarily on the estates where they had been held in bondage… imposed a rigid system of forced labor, annulling previous sales of land to field laborers and subjecting plantation workers to military discipline,” all because he “viewed the plantation as key to the island’s prosperity” (11). This adherence to the old economic system, which seemed incompatible with the new population of freedmen, was recognized as a mistake by republicans attempting to learn lessons from Haiti when debating emancipation and Reconstruction:
Even Toussant now came in for censure, for what Lydia Marie Child calls “his favorite project of conciliating the old planters.” Toussaint’s mistake, Child believed, lay in “a hurry to reconstruct, to restore outward prosperity,” rather than attempting radically to transform his society on the basis of free labor principles (42).
In the British Caribbean, as opposed to Haiti, emancipation was imposed by the British Government, which was often at odds with the local government ruling the colonies themselves. Yet “on one crucial matter, British authorities and Caribbean planters agreed: the postemancipation sugar colonies should continue to be organized around the production of staple crops for export rather than self-sufficient peasant farming” (15). This conviction led to the importation of indentured laborers, and various restrictions which prevented the freedmen from achieving economic independence to various degrees depending on factors, like the amount of unclaimed or uncultivated land, specific to each colony.
The same unwillingness to change the plantation status quo ruled the American South. As Foner explains,
The plantation system never dominated the entire South as it did in the islands, yet both before and after emancipation, it helped define the quality of race relations and the nature of economic enterprise in the region as a whole. It was in the plantation black belt that the majority of the emancipated slaves lived, and it was the necessity, as perceived by whites, of maintaining the plantation system, that made labor such an obsession in the aftermath of emancipation (44).
In all of these societies, a wealthy class that had amassed its riches and power through the plantation system could not, or did not want to, conceive a different economic system for the societies in which they lived, one that would be more compatible with making emancipation a reality, not just a hollow word.