Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0009-8571-9965

Date of Award

5-4-2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

Charles Steffen

Second Advisor

Jeffrey Young

Third Advisor

Jonathan Bryant

Abstract

At the end of the Civil War, the struggles between working people and the capitalist class moved to the center of US politics. In Georgia, freedmen fought for an agrarian revolution—forty acres and a mule—and rejected “free labor.” Poor and yeomen whites demanded relief from oppressive debt. When Radical Reconstruction began, masses of working people awoke to political life. Tens of thousands of freedmen and poor whites joined Union Leagues. Freedmen confronted planters in the fields and rebel officials in the streets and prepared militarily to seize their forty acres. With property rights under threat, Republicans gave the army the task of dismantling the Union Leagues. Then the army stood aside while Georgia’s rebel ruling class used terror and violence to complete the job against its enemies, white as well as black. Class conflict, not race, was the submerged shoal on which Reconstruction in Georgia foundered.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/qfks-rw83

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