The Politics of Collective Landownership during Reconstruction

The federal government’s failure to enact lasting, redistributive land reform is a twice-told, agonizing failure of Reconstruction. What we still seldom appreciate is how the incredible political and labor ferment of that period contributed to impressive gains in freedpeople’s collective purchase of land. This paper argues that the cooperative purchase of land was an extension of freedpeople’s political organizing and labor activism during Reconstruction. Newly freed railroad workers cobbled together their earnings to buy farms and homesteads. Freedpeople’s churches pooled resources and bought land. Union soldiers organized to buy large tracts of land, using their earnings from the U.S. government. Lodges and voluntary land-buying organizations also provided collective avenues for individual families to settle on their own land. After Reconstruction, when freedpeople and their descendants were fighting to maintain political power and more likely to buy land individually, they nevertheless continued to treat land as a collective resource. Freedpeople’s collective accumulation of land must be viewed as a political act.