The American emancipation experience, according to Foner, was very different from the way emancipation took place in Haiti or the British West Indies. Since the experiences in the West Indies and Haiti occurred long before emancipation in the United States, American politicians and abolitionists were able to both learn from the mistakes made in these previous scenarios and be inspired by the revolutions’ success.
The most immediate and obvious difference is that unlike in Haiti or the British West Indies, freed slaves were given full political rights. While this may seem insignificant to present-day eyes, this level of political rights for other races was completely unprecedented, since in the case of Haiti or the British West Indies, not even all white males were considered entitled to basic political rights. Therefore the freedom given to slaves in the states following emancipation was not just freedom from enslavement, but also the right to practice the same basic political rights any male American citizen could enjoy. As Froner says, “What made the American experience distinct was that the polity as well as the field became an area of confrontation between former master and former slave” (45). As the legacy of Jim Crowe laws, black codes and poll taxes has shown, freedmen were not always able to exercise these political rights, nevertheless the fact that the right to vote was Constitutionally guaranteed for freedpeople was revolutionary when compared to the British West Indies or Haiti.
In the wake of emancipation in all three areas, planters were still in need of cheap labor that would cultivate their crops. In the United States, though, thanks to the political rights afforded to them, blacks were much more successfully able to oppose the import of immigrant labor to replace the work that they did. Southern whites were strong advocates of immigration, particularly Irish immigration, in the hopes that they would be more willing to work the fields in the plantations. Unfortunately for Southerners, though, the vast majority of immigrants who came in through checkpoints such as Ellis Island in the North found jobs in the North and rarely made it down to the South. Therefore, blacks continued to work on plantations without the threat of being replaced by cheaper, more willing labor.
Froner closes Nothing But Freedom with the story of blacks working in the rice fields in South Carolina. While he acknowledges that this story is unconventional and uniquely suited to the particular conditions surrounding rice cultivation and South Carolina, the events that took place there are still significant in indicating the distinctive aspects of American emancipation when compared to other nations. In South Carolina, slaves had already enjoyed a great deal of freedom, due to the nature of the way rice was cultivated. In the wake of emancipation, most of the slaves were able to remain in control as they were still the ones best suited to cultivate the rice crop and planters had become dependent on them. Despite planters’ efforts to negotiate with the slaves, in most cases immediately following the Civil War, they had enough leverage that they were able to continue living in their communities on the plantations, cultivating their own crops and making wages from the work they did on the plantations. When this sharecropping system changed to more heavily favor the farmers, riots and marches broke out to ensure that blacks were still given fair treatment. This type of political organization and mobilization would have been unheard of in the West Indies or Haiti, however, the unique situation of the United states facilitated this.