Evolution of labor and reconstitution of plantation system on sugar and cotton plantations of lower Mississippi valley during 1863. Sugar and cotton reflect different regimens but also share characteristics in common: conflict between former slaveholders and former slaves over new modes of work; Federal officials fear dependency of freed people on government support; plantation-leasing system to northern transplants intended to bring free-labor notions to South. Planters determined to reestablish labor control; freed people determined to achieve meaningful economic independence. Wartime military free labor in sugar and cotton regions encounters many difficulties, and all parties express dissatisfaction with system. By end of year, calls for reformed system for 1864. Military free labor essential step in moving from emancipating slaves to abolishing slavery, but also reveals shortcomings of military emancipation.

Wartime free labor under military auspices evolves in the Union-occupied lower Mississippi valley during the second half of 1864. Legislatures of Arkansas and Louisiana fail to address new labor arrangements, and plantation affairs remain under Federal military authority. Sugar planters, confronting the abolition of slavery in Louisiana, clamor for labor and racial control in planning for the 1865, whereas freedpeople and their advocates call for economic independence and criticize the Unionist government’s failure to implement racial equality. The cotton region witnesses continuing conflict over the new labor arrangements, with freedpeople pushing for alternatives to wage labor and access to land. The Davis Bend community underscores black aspirations for economic independence, while reports of the reenslavement of freedpeople along the Mississippi River illustrate the desperation of former slaveholders to preserve slavery.

Military success in early 1862 leads to substantive Federal presence in the lower Mississippi valley. By mid-1862, Federal forces hold Helena, Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans. The Federal presence sparks large numbers of fugitive slaves to seek freedom, forcing Federal military officials to deal with the slavery issue. The lower Mississippi valley witnesses the first instance of extensive Federal territorial control and large numbers of fugitive slaves. It also experiences the first substantive efforts toward “Reconstruction,” though the failure of southern Unionists – in Louisiana especially – to seize the initiative influences Lincoln in issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The emancipatory provisions of the 1862 Confiscation Act partly in response to developments in the lower Mississippi valley, but contrasting responses of slaves and slaveholders to the Federal presence in the region, also reveal the difficulties of implementing the act.

The evolution of wartime free labor and the reorganizing of the plantation regimen in the sugar and cotton regions of the lower Mississippi valley during the first half of 1864. Federal military labor policy expands upon the rights of the freedpeople, in response to earlier criticism, but it still includes elements of involuntary labor. Sugar planters maintain their insistence that slavery still exists, but they accommodate themselves to new labor arrangements in order to operate their plantations. The cotton plantations also experience conflict between former slaveholders and freedpeople over labor, as well as jurisdictional disputes between Federal military and Treasury Department officials over administering the plantation-leasing system. Confederate raids, along with other difficulties, continue to disrupt development of the new labor system, and reenslavement remains a danger.

This chapter reviews the data that scholars have started to assemble on the volume, content, targeting, and effect of paid online advertising in the United States. It discusses how online advertising is regulated through formal rules and shaped informally by content negotiations between advertisers and platforms. It also explains how the decentralized methods of purchasing digital ads make systematic research challenging. That said, this review (at best) provides tentative conclusions, which will be tested in earnest over the next few years. In many ways, then, we are at a precipice awaiting the flood of more systematic analyses yet to come as scholars dig into the newly available data. With that in mind, it reviews what is known at present and evaluates the information that is available through the platform archives.