Learning from emancipation: The Port Royal Experiment and transition theory

The sociotechnical regime

By the opening of the Civil War, cotton textile production—from soil to mill—represented 60% of American exports and US production represented more than 80% of all cotton used in manufacturing worldwide (O’Connor, 1968). “The importance of Southern cotton to the global economy,” as stated by Sven Beckert (2016: 41) “can be compared only to the world's dependence on Middle Eastern oil a century later” and “no other manufacturing industry employed as many people.” Slave labor represented more than 80% of all cotton labor and, therefore, if the Civil War led to the end of slavery, a major transformation of the labor process involved in cotton production would be inevitable.

From the transition studies perspective, antebellum plantation slavery cotton agriculture can be seen as a stable system characterized by the lock-in of stabilizing rules. It is easy to see that Geels’ lock-in rules of shared cultural beliefs—cognitive, normative, and formal—were present in the plantation slavery system. Cognitive routines in both North and South could not look beyond slavery as a necessary system (Foner, 2011). Rules about proper behavior also stabilized plantation agriculture and slavery in the United States. Norms of white paternalism pervaded both North and South, reinforcing the concept that only property-owning male Anglo-Whites were capable of participating in the nation as full citizens. Strong norms about hierarchy and property reinforced the stability of the system (Genovese, 2014). Fear that the four million emancipated slaves would challenge these racial notions was part of the landscape that stabilized the system (Foner, 2011). Finally, the North and South were bound together by the formal economic contracts that tied northern cotton factories to southern plantations. Plantation owners, in turn, were dependent on Northern factors for credit and markets. Both North and South were tied by formal laws protecting the slave owners’ property in slaves, strengthened during the 1850s by increasingly tight laws requiring the return of escaped slaves. Cognitive, normative, and formal rules therefore created a stable system that allowed little in the way of change (Foner, 2011).

Abolitionism as a disruptive radical niche

Abolitionist societies existed even as early as the Revolution, with one signer of The Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, also the founder of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (DuPuis, 2015). Yet, even into the Civil War, support for the emancipation of slaves was limited and extensively resisted even in the North (Foner, 2011; Gates, 2019). It is possible to see Abolitionists as a radical niche group, challenging the cognitive lock-in rules around slavery and struggling to present the end of slavery as a realistic way to rethink the cotton labor system.

As Geels (2004: 912) notes, radical niches emerge in “protective spaces” which allow for innovation through social and technical experimentation. These “experimental projects” allow “deviations from the existing regime” to emerge and, sometimes, challenge the stability of sociotechnical systems. Abolitionists carried out many of these projects, which could be seen as including Thoreau's civil disobedience and Walden experiment, as well as radical Transcendental and Unitarian movements such as Fruitlands, Brook Farm, and the vegetarian boarding houses where Abolitionists congregated when travelling to cities. Vegetarianism, water cures, utopian communities, and other experiments were tightly coupled with Abolitionism as a radical experiment (DuPuis, 2015).

Interestingly, the antislavery niche included a number of cotton mill industrialists. In 1861, a young cotton mill manager, Edward Atkinson, published the first of hundreds of articles he would write over the next 50 years. His pamphlet, “Cheap Cotton by Free Labor,” made the argument that cotton could be grown more cheaply by independent smallholders—including emancipated Black yeoman—than by cotton plantation slaves. Written at the start of the Civil War but before emancipation, the pamphlet was widely published and discussed among Northern Abolitionists as the map to cotton's economic future and to the economic independence of cotton labor (Abbott, 1991).

In his 20s, Atkinson was already heavily involved in antislavery societies in Boston, including the men who had earlier sent guns and ammunition to John Brown and his Kansas volunteers (Rose, 1964: 37). Treasurer of a number of cotton mills, he also became Treasurer of a group of Boston mill owners who funded the Port Royal Experiment. “Cheap Cotton with Free Labor,” written in 1861, was a plan to break into the lock-in of the cotton slave regime: it laid out a plan for a social transition that would involve increasing freeholder cotton agriculture in Texas and other parts of the West. Atkinson used Texas as the example of cotton's future. His vision imagined creating a niche experiment of smallholder yeomen who would disrupt the plantation cotton system by proving they could grow the crop more cheaply.

Despite his youth, Atkinson was already one of the foremost experts on the cotton supply. As the manager of several cotton mills, his job involved purchasing cotton for the mills. In particular, he was a student of cotton production, reading southern agricultural journals but in particular by sending his agent into the South to examine cotton crops as a way to determine supply and, therefore, prices. In “Cheap Cotton” he relies on this knowledge to argue that the Union should invade Texas and buy manumission of Texas slaves, thereby allowing smallholder cotton agriculture there to supply the Northern cotton mills, many of which were closing because of lack of supply during the war.

As Atkinson rethinks the labor process involved in growing cotton, he also comments, using the evidence from Southern agricultural journals, on the ways in which cotton agriculture could be improved through technological changes. He notes with surprise that the plow is seldom used for cultivation instead of the hoe. He argues, intrinsically, that yeoman agriculture would lead to greater use of more advanced forms of technology because it would be more efficient. He notes that his evidence for the technology argument is thin, that his argument is “theoretical,” and that it is “got up by a special pleader who has no experience in the matter.” But, he writes: “Where is the opportunity for a practical test? Is not the case strong enough to demand one?”

Atkinson, as an Abolitionist, was envisioning a future in which a Union victory led to emancipation. That future would require a major transformation of the labor process involved in cotton production. In his pamphlet, Atkinson presented how this transition could take place: how the labor process could be transformed and how to forge a new economic relationship between the agricultural South and the industrial North. It was his impression that the free labor cotton-growing system was already gaining rapidly as it moved West. His antislavery approach was to break the plantation system through economic means: through price competition based on more efficient yeoman farmers able to offer their cotton at a lower price than the plantations. In an aside, he agreed that free Blacks could either join the ranks of yeoman or “starve.” Atkinson notes that “the spinners”—the mill owners—had expanded their operations greatly in the last decade, which resulted in a soaring price for cotton. The growth of cotton production also raised the price of slaves, which raised the cost of production. Atkinson argued, “Slave labor could no longer supply the demand” for cotton, because—as he showed with pages of statistics—plantation agriculture was inefficient. Therefore, free labor small producers would outcompete plantation cotton producers by profitably meeting the needs of the cotton mills, offering cotton to the market at a lower price, because they did not have to purchase and maintain slaves. Atkinson imagines an economic war being carried out along with the military one.

The Texas plan never succeeded. However, circumstances led to Atkinson raising money for the experiment to be carried out in a different place with different labor: using the “contraband” slaves behind Union lines in the South Carolina Sea Islands around Port Royal. Four months after the publication of “Cheap Cotton,” 53 missionaries arrived in Port Royal, South Carolina, to carry out what was very close to Atkinson's “practical test,” funded mostly by the Boston Education Commission for Freedmen, for which Atkinson was the Treasurer. This was the ultimate protected radical niche in which to test out a new way to grow cotton. As his letters make clear, Atkinson was the main organizer of a group in terms of gathering funds and publicizing the Port Royal project in Northern publications. The futurizing vision described by Atkinson in his pamphlet had turned into a radical niche experiment. He made sure that the letters sent home by the missionaries were published widely, in order to help raise funding for the project (Rose, 1964).

A number of historians have written about the Port Royal free labor experiments, in particular Rose’s (1964) Rehearsal for Reconstruction, which closely follows the story of “Gideon's Band”: the group of Northerners sent to Port Royal to teach the still-officially-enslaved Black “contrabands” how to become yeoman farmers. As Rose and others show, the success of this experiment was mixed, and much of its failure at the time was blamed on the Black workers themselves. More recently, histories of the Port Royal project have emphasized both the reneging of commitments to freedman to land and support as well as the unique situation that allowed the Sea Island Freedman community to acquire land (Ochai, 2001). As a result, Port Royal has become a major narrative in the contemporary story both of Black land dispossession and the foundation of Gullah Island culture.

As history has made clear, the transition to cotton agriculture by free labor yeoman farmers did not come about. By the 1880s, 60% of cotton was grown on shares and the plantations, which Atkinson predicted would break up into small farms, were mostly cultivated by sharecrop and rental contractors (Ransom and Sutch, 2001). There is a large literature from the disciplines of history, economics, and sociology that explains the transition from slavery to emancipated labor, primarily sharecropping and various other forms of tenant farming which cannot be covered here. However, there are interesting parallels between the explanations of the socioeconomic transitions in agriculture with emancipation and socioeconomic transitions from the MLP perspective. Like this study, scholars have applied the MLP perspective to both historical cases and to the analysis of paths to the future. This combination of looking both backward and forward also applies to the emancipation transition, with actors such as Edward Atkinson providing an analysis of the past and a vision of what the future of agriculture could be if slavery came to an end. In particular, some historical explanations argue that plantation slavery was inefficient and bound to eventual failure (Genovese, 2014). On the other hand, some historians, economists, and sociologists argue that plantation slavery was successful, even capitalistic (Aitken, 1971). Some who argue that the plantation was neither efficient nor especially profitable also argue that it nonetheless persisted because of institutions that maintained the planter group in power. A recent literature on the “legacy of slavery” parallels the MLP idea of “lock-in”: the idea that institutions of power and coercion persisted even after emancipation (Reece and O’Connell, 2016), continuing to trap Black agricultural producers in subaltern positions through debt peonage (Ransom and Sutch, 2001). Others have argued that, while the persistence of these institutions maintain relations of inequality, that emancipation gave Black farmers enough autonomy to negotiate sharecropping contracts, allowing them the ability to control their own and their family labor (Ruef, 2016; Reidy, 1995). These conversations about the “durability” of inequality and the institutions that support these relations are part of a larger literature on the nature and persistence of social institutions in history (Tilly, 1998).

Whether or not one sees the demise of Reconstruction and the rise of sharecropping as the persistence of White Supremacy in the South, it is worth asking what happened to the “niche” of Abolitionists who, from the MLP perspective, were posed to disrupt the slave regime. Was Northern acquiescence to White Supremacy in the Redemption South simply a surrender to the persistent lock-in of racial prejudice in the South, or was it, simply, based on shared racial prejudice that had always existed in the North (Dattel 2009; Abbott, 1991; Gates, 2019). Was the radical niche of Abolitionism foiled by the persistent antebellum institutions of the plantation regime?

The contingent political ecology of Sea Island cotton production

When the radicals looked to prove the viability of free Black labor in growing cotton through their experiments at Port Royal, they assumed that this region was representative of cotton agriculture. However, the ecology of cotton on the South Carolina Sea Islands was environmentally, socially, and economically different from Deep South cotton-growing regions. The Sea Islanders grew long staple cotton, not for the mills of New England but for European lace-making and other luxury textile industries (Porcher and Fick, 2005). This much older cotton production system had the global monopoly on long-staple cotton, and this “brown seed” cotton brought a much higher price than short-staple “green seed” mill cotton. Atkinson and the Northerners who came to the Sea Islands knew that the cotton grown there was a different variety, but their narratives indicate that they did not fully understand the major differences in labor process between Sea Island cotton and short-staple cotton production.

The difference between the two cottons was more than just the staple length. First, Sea Island cotton was a much older variety of cotton that had been grown and exported profitably for a much longer period of time. The boll is easily separated from the seed, which made it a profitable crop even before the invention of the cotton gin. Therefore, the production system there was long established. Yet, because cotton tends to cross-pollinate, long-staple cotton was an extremely fragile in its genetics, so that it only could be produced in isolation from other cotton varieties. This is why the Sea Islands were so important to long-staple cotton production, along with the availability of sea grasses to fertilize the soil that would otherwise have long ago been exhausted. Planters had bred these varieties over generations with selection to improve seeds, and kept the seeds for their own use only. The isolation allowed planters to maintain sole control of their seed, and many planters maintained their seed exclusively for their own use. Because the price of the best long-staple cotton was significantly higher than other cottons, Sea Island cotton was highly profitable. The region around Charleston and Beaufort was therefore the richest region of the South. It was also the center of Secession: Charleston and Beaufort planters had been the first to secede from the Union (Cauthen, 2005; Porcher and Fick, 2005).

Sea Island cotton production was isolated for another reason: in order to avoid island's malarial climate, planter families did not live near the cotton fields for at least half of the year. While planters did assign drivers to their plantations, the work itself was organized according to the task system: slaves—considered, not always correctly, to be genetically immune or “seasoned” (survivors) to malaria—were assigned plots of cotton land to cultivate by assigned “task.” They were also given plots of land to grow their own provisions. As many who have examined the economics of cotton production in the 19th century have noted, the labor needs of producing cotton varied throughout the year, meaning that the need for labor had dips and peaks. The difficulty of oversight in a malarial climate, the isolation of the islands, the needs for slaves to self-provision, and the cotton growing cycle resulted in a unique labor system in The Sea Islands. After a slave fulfilled the day's task, they could use the rest of their time as they saw fit (Gray and Thompson, 1958). As a result, slaves in the Sea Islands not only grew their own sustenance but many also carried out a significant business of autonomous vegetable and livestock production for the market. In addition, slaves fished and hunted (generally trapping since slaves were seldom allowed to own guns) for themselves and to sell. In other words, the slaves in this area participated in three different production systems: as slaves growing cotton for the world market, as householders growing subsistence crops for themselves, and as entrepreneurs growing vegetables and fishing/hunting for local markets. These 8000 Sea Island slaves, in other words, were already part of a number of household, global, and local networks and markets (Morgan, 1982) as were slaves—to a greater or lesser extent—in many other parts of the antebellum South (Saville, 1991).

Also, these slaves already participated in the wage labor system. In the Sea Islands, ecological conditions that created the task system also made work for wages more common. Slaves could work for wages any day after finishing their assigned task, which in most cases, by custom, was around 1 pm. In this way, some slaves in the Sea Islands, and other parts of the Southeastern Coast where task labor was the norm, accumulated substantial capital. One way we know the extent of property ownership by slaves is the testimony of freedmen to the Southern Claims Commission after the Civil War. Historian Jacqueline Jones has described freedmen testimonies such as that of Alexander Steele, who testified that he had “‘by industry and economy’ stockpiled rice, honey, and lard, and raised and marketed cows, chickens, mules, turkeys, and hogs. Planters such as Potter allowed their enslaved laborers to work for themselves after they finished their daily tasks in the fields, granting each person, in Steele's words, the ‘liberty of trading and trafficking for himself’” (Jones, 2010: 188). Jones argues that slaves shared with Whites a desire to engage in profit-making activities. Not just in the Sea Islands, but in and around Southern cities like Savanah, Georgia, “the city and the countryside formed a regional economy that relied on the trade conducted by slaves and free blacks” (Jones, 2010: 193). In other words, the question continually asked by Atkinson and others contemplating emancipation: “Will the freed slave participate in the market?” was already answered in the Sea Islands.

However, what is clear in their reports is that the missionaries were blind to the ways in which the Black people of the Sea Islands had participated in multiple economies and several forms of labor organization, as slaves, as wage workers, and as small-scale local entrepreneurs. The Northerners who came to supervise cotton production saw their job as making the slaves work for an hourly wage, generally through “gang” labor, in which groups of Blacks worked together in the cultivation and picking of cotton. Because the missionaries were financially supported by cotton industrialists, they defined the market not in terms of local market exchange and entrepreneurship but only in terms of a more specific question: “Will the freed slave grow cotton?” thereby participating in the global commodity market (Rose, 1964). As Atkinson and others working in Port Royal stated, if freed slaves did not grow cotton, they would lack income and become a burden on society (Abbott, 1991). Northern Abolitionists did not notice Sea Island Black entrepreneurship, self-sufficiency, or participation in local market exchange.

By the end of the Civil War, Southerners—both Black and White—would indeed grow cotton not as yeoman but primarily as sharecroppers. Interestingly, this form of labor is closer to the task system, in that it involved the autonomous production of cotton on a specific plot of land. Instead of Atkinson's vision of the eventual ownership of land through free labor, the most common result was sharecropping or rental on previous plantations (Ruef, 2016; Mandle, 1983). Many have told the story of “40 acres and a mule”: the promise of Black landownership and the denial of the opportunity for freed slaves to own land (see e.g. Oubre, 1978; Foner, 2011). In the Sea Islands, where the Freedman's Bureau first expressed something like that promise, some freedmen did in fact become landowners, mostly through land purchase. However, for the most part, what lands had been promised, as many accounts have shown, were later withdrawn and returned to the plantation owners (Ochai, 2001). The Port Royal missionary societies did object to unfair treatment of Blacks in their attempts to purchase land, but for the most part, they insisted that Blacks get access to land only through purchase, denying them the kind of land access available to White settlers in the West (Abbott, 1991).

Contradiction

As noted above, transition studies can give us a clue as to why Port Royal missionaries were blind to the realities of the Sea Islands economy and its labor processes. “Cognitive lock-in” makes it difficult for institutional actors to see alternatives to the current sociotechnical regime. This may be correct when looking at whether or not external niche alternatives like renewable energy are viable. However, in the case of the Sea Islands, cognitive lock-in was not about niche alternatives but about the regime itself. The Sea Island economy was based on multiple labor processes with variable amounts of embeddedness in various market systems. It was this embeddedness that made the regime function. Northern missionaries, however, were unable to cognitively process the regime systems. Instead, they tried to establish new systems based on wage labor and hourly work in gangs (Rose, 1964; Abbott, 1991; DuBois WEB, 2017).

Transition studies also attributes regime stability to a landscape of shared values. From that perspective, a change of regime comes about through a change of values at the meta-level. However, historians describe the North and South as not just economically and politically “sectionalist,” but also culturally at odds. In Cavalier and Yankee, Taylor describes the United States as composed of two major competing value systems in the North and South, which only tightened as Northern Abolitionism increasingly challenged Southern slavery. While both defined American citizenship in terms of respectability, how they defined respect differed substantially. In the North, respectability was very much influenced by Victorian norms of virtue as self-control while Southern respectability was based on Romantic notions of chivalry and hospitality (Taylor, 1993). In other words, the plantation cotton regime may have tied North and South economically, but it was not a regime based on shared values. Northerners viewed Southerners as degenerate and prone to the sin of “luxury” while Southerners viewed Yankees as acquisitive, ascetic, and selfish and themselves as a chivalrous society of “honor and integrity” (Taylor, 1993). In other words, former slaves were caught between these two ideals and seldom able to present their own ideas of right living. Instead, Northern missionaries “were ultimately expected to depict captive Africans moving toward the full embrace of Protestant Christian conversion and its ethics of obedience, hard work, moderation, and sexual propriety (Hunter, 2017: 41). ² Civic republican virtues of self-control and self-denial were part of the Yankee ideal of right living and one Yankee missionaries expected Black freedmen to share. Abolitionists saw the sectionalist disagreement between the North and the South as a struggle of ideals. The experiment at Port Royal was therefore a test of whether Blacks were capable of the virtues of citizenship as defined by Yankees. For this reason, the efforts at Port Royal were more than teaching Blacks how to read and write; the goal was to inculcate them with Yankee virtues (Hunter, 2017). As historian Eric Foner (Foner, 2011) has argued, for worker or farmer, freedom according to this ideal was “free labor,” that is, the independence of working for a living, with the goal of accumulating enough money to become an independent property owner, either of land or a business. What Southerners saw as “acquisitiveness” was to Northerners the dedication to hard work that would lead to the rewards of ownership. Rose (1964) describes the missionary societies as a test not just of Black Freedmen but also of these Northern ideals: “Far from the Border State area and safely insulated from interference from the old masters, the Sea Island conditions seemed ready and waiting for a real transplanting of Northern values….The decadent South, with its antique civil arrangements, would be regenerated by the vigorous institutions of New England” (Rose, 1964: 38).

In other words, Yankee expectations were not only based on their attitudes toward Black people, they were also based on how Yankees saw themselves (Griffin, 1960). Northern Yankee attitudes toward Blacks were imbued with Yankee ideas about the nature of freedom and civic virtue in relation to citizenship. Despite their reputation as radicals, the Abolitionists were very much influenced by the Yankee notion of respectability, in particular the ideal of virtue as self-control. Even free Blacks in the North realized that, to gain broad public acceptance, they would need to follow the precepts of what Henry Louis Gates calls, “the politics of respectability” (Gates, 2019). Yankees saw themselves as significantly more self-controlled than Southerners, Black or White (Ring, 2012). As Lincoln described in his Second Inaugural Address, the Civil War was a moral test in which God sat in judgment over which side would win (DuPuis, 2015). With the Union victory, the North could claim cultural and moral superiority. As Henry Ward Beecher told the Home Missionary Society in 1863, America after victory would be run by “northern men, with northern ideas, and with a northern gospel” (Griffin, 1960: 262). The idea of respectability in the North maintained this connection with Yankee ideas of virtue throughout the late 19th century: “Middle-class status and Yankee blood were the mainstays of Republican strength. Lord Bryce remarks of a slightly later period that in almost any northern city, when dining out with ‘the best people,’ one's neighbor was almost certain to be a Republican. Indeed, Democrats themselves grudgingly recognized their opponents’ social superiority, sneering at them as the ‘God and Morality Party’” (Unger, 1968: 72).

From the Yankee's cultural perspective, therefore, all Southerners—not just slaves—were unfree, because they were slaves to indulgence and pleasure. While Yankees declaimed aristocratic societies as degenerate and dependent on luxurious tastes, Southern planters raised aristocratic paternalism to a virtue. The freed slaves were forced to walk a path between these ideals, without a way to form a civic voice with a commitment to their own ideals, a problem DuBois referred to as “double-consciousness” (Du Bois WEB, 2008 [1903]).

Therefore, for the Yankee missionaries, the question of whether the 8000 Black men and women of the Sea Islands could be “free” was a moral question of whether they could be, as they termed it, “civilized” according to Northern ways of life (Ochai, 2001). It was a question of saving America from both the supposed dependency on sloth or luxury that separated out truly free people from the shiftless and the aristocratic. Humans needed the opportunity to be free and if they took that opportunity and chose freedom through their will, then they would be seen as among those who could eventually gain the property that made them truly independent (Foner, 2011). Therefore, Abolitionists were locked in, both cognitively and normatively, to the idea that slaves must free themselves from the bondage of Southern immorality to join the ranks of Yankee respectability. Then—and only then—they should have the opportunity to own land.

For the Yankee Abolitionist missionaries, therefore, teaching was more than literacy; it was their mission to teach the contraband slaves, not yet free, to think and believe like Yankees, beginning with the soon-to-be freedmen of Port Royal (Rose, 1964). The educational philosopher and Abolitionist, Bronson Alcott, had argued that rationality and virtuous self-control could be taught (DuPuis, 2015). The letters that the missionaries sent back home from Port Royal continually spoke of this other kind of instruction. Tellingly, their descriptions favorably compared the Blacks they taught from what they considered disreputable Irish immigrants (Rose, 1964). In their letters, the missionaries expressed their hope that, with the education and training they were providing, the freed slaves would become truly free by learning how to be respectable.

The Yankee missionaries therefore landed in the Sea Islands to test the universal character of the “freed slave” and the ability of this group of people to submit to two disciplinary ideals: the missionary virtuous discipline of rational self-control as displayed in their way of life, including their participation in the economic discipline of the market. The question was: While human, were they worthy? Would they become virtuous citizens participating in the free market? Both of these questions were subsumed under the more direct question: Would they grow cotton? Or, as Port Royal plantation manager Edward Philbrick put it, “Will the people of African descent work for a living?” (Rose, 1964). In the civic republican mind, where the Yankee was virtuous and hardworking and the Southerner (and immigrants) self-indulgent, if slaves were to be virtuous citizens, they had to take on the practice of Yankee respectability. To save the South was more than to remove it from the sin of slavery. All Southerners had to be removed from the sin of aristocracy and luxurious living (Kolchin, 2003). Of course, the slaves were neither, but the aristocrats had insisted that they were beings who could only be induced to work through dependency and violence. So, slaves, according to their Masters, were dependent and slovenly. For Yankees, the only way to free the South entailed “remaking the South in the image of the North” (Powell, 1998: 56).

In the Yankee view of society and its government, freedom provided opportunity, but it did not confer political membership. Membership had to be achieved, through respectability, free labor, and by avoiding the bonds of dependency. Those who were dependent—women, children, slaves, paupers, as well as those addicted to passion, luxury, and sloth—were not free and therefore not fully citizens deserving of rights and access to resources (DuPuis, 2015). Men not capable of self-control gave up the freedom offered them and were outside of the citizenry (Ochai, 2001). In a viewpoint that combined Calvinism with Locke, rights came to those who, with their self-control and hard work, used their freedom to gain property and their property to gain citizenship.

By the end of the Civil War, Atkinson and his Northern Cotton Mill associates abandoned the project to turn freed slaves into cotton-growing smallholders. Along with it died a social movement that had lasted decades, had sacrificed lives both on the battlefield, in personal attacks and in years of commitment to the cause. The same values that had inspired Abolitionists to fight for the end of slavery kept them from fighting for Black land rights. In fact, Northerners did not just abandon Blacks, they abandoned the South to its dark years of violence and oppression (DuBois WEB, 2017). Their ideas had also made them blind to the fact that the Black people of the Sea Islands were already acquisitive and entrepreneurial, traits of character that would be severely sanctioned with the end of Reconstruction. Finally, the Sea Island labor system was influenced by the ecology of the region and could not be used as a universal measure of broad questions about free slaves’ willingness to continue participation in cotton production.