UGA Press: Making Freedom Pay • Holt


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Making Freedom Pay
North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865-1900
Sharon Ann Holt

How freedpeople in North Carolina built rewarding lives in spite of legal and social disadvantages

In Making Freedom Pay, Sharon Ann Holt reconstructs how freed men and women in tobacco-growing central North Carolina worked to secure a place for themselves in a ravaged region and hostile time. Her microeconomic history of Granville County, North Carolina, drawn extensively from public records, assembles stories of individual lives from the initial days of emancipation to the turn of the century. Making Freedom Pay uses these highly personalized accounts of the day-to-day travails and victories of ordinary people to tell a nationally significant story of grassroots uplift.

Sharon Ann Holt has taught history, women's studies, and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Rutgers University, Camden, and Bryn Mawr College. She is a recipient of the Southern Historical Association's Greene-Ramsdell Prize.

February 2003

ISBN 0820324426 paper • $24.95

216 pp. • 6 x 9 in. • 5 tables • 5 figures

"Rich, imaginative, and suggestive . . . Simultaneously demonstrates the immense burdens that freedpeople shouldered in the pursuit of family and community development and the multifaceted and creative energies they brought to the tasks . . . This small but fascinating book makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of black life in the postemancipation South."
—Journal of American History

"Provides a wonderfully nuanced look at the actual lives of African-American farmers over the course of the late nineteenth century."
—Georgia Historical Quarterly

"A valuable resource for those interested in the struggle of freedpeople in the South."
—Labor History

"A useful study of national policy implemented on the local level. Freedom obtained after the Civil War raised questions about the exact status of the former slaves and about how they would fit into the social and economic structures of the South . . . As an integral part of this study, Holt emphasizes the important role that the freed women played in the transfer from a slave to a free society, showing that even though many histories ignore their role, their household production made a significant contribution to family well-being. This book is useful for a better understanding of the impact made by the Civil War beyond its military and political effects. It is also useful in understanding late-19th-century women's history and economic history."
—Choice

"Making Freedom Pay highlights the role of household production played after the Civil War in advancing the economic condition of the freedpeople. It accomplishes this through painstaking and detailed research as well as innovative methodology."-Robert C. Kenzer, author of Enterprising Southerners: Black Economic Success in North Carolina, 1865-1915

"Making Freedom Pay celebrates the vision and achievements of the first generation of freedpeople in North Carolina."-Michele Gillespie, Florida Historical Quarterly

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