Crystal Feimster examines the Black soldiers of the 4th Regiment of the Native Guard (also known as the Corps dAfrique) stationed at Fort Jackson, Louisiana, and the laundresses who served them and their white officers. Both Black soldiers and laundresses were formerly enslaved people who had seized their freedom by joining and aiding the Union cause. Over the course of six weeks, in December 1863 and January 1864, they engaged in open munity to protest racial and sexual violence inflicted by White Union officers. In so doing they made visible the violent terms of interracial interaction that informed the meaning of wartime freedom and Black labor (terms that were still very much rooted in the prisms and discourses of enslavement). More importantly, as free labor, Black women began to negotiate a deeply abusive racial and sexual terrain.

Karen Cook Bell interrogates how Black women in Louisiana and Georgia used Freedmen’s Bureau courts and their knowledge of the landscape to make their own freedom. In both regions, low wages and legal battles placed formerly enslaved women at a disadvantage; however, their labor aided their families and communities. Through the “contract labor system” in Louisiana and access to abandoned lands in Georgia, these women were able to improve their conditions in the short term. While some freedpeople derived marginal economic benefits from wage labor in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Louisiana these newly emancipated women were persistent in their demands for full and fair compensation from the Bureau of Free Labor, which adjudicated a significant number of cases in their favor.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

With Lincoln having issued preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Unionists in Tennessee and southern Louisiana undertake to organize congressional elections so as to gain exclusion from the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Lincoln encourages southern Unionists – and provides them military assistance – in their efforts. Lincoln’s Annual Message in December 1862 puts forward compensated abolition plan, providing for abolition in the rebellious states. Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation, but exclusion of Tennessee and southern Louisiana do not comport with specifications in the preliminary version. Exclusions will provide opportunity for proslavery Unionists to salvage slavery, but proclamation also raises issue of how fate of slavery will factor into restoring rebellious states to the Union.

The Federal Red River campaign of spring 1864 is a military and political disaster, casting a pall over Louisiana’s constitutional convention and the inauguration of Arkansas’s Unionist government. Federal forces ostensibly control most of Arkansas, but such control tenuous in places, and the Arkansas government encounters much resistance to its authority. The Louisiana constitutional convention crafts a free-state constitution, but conservative Unionists contest it relentlessly, and the large majority of free-state delegates oppose black political and legal equality. The organization of a free-state government and constitution in Tennessee remains on hold, although Andrew Johnson nominated as Lincoln’s running-mate in the 1864 election. Confederate atrocities against black Union troops at Poison Spring and Marks’ Mill, Arkansas, and at Fort Pillow in Tennessee underscore the determination to preserve slavery.

The Union capture of Atlanta in early September 1864 reframes the presidential election and the war. Louisiana’s free-state constitution wins voter approval and becomes operative, formally abolishing slavery in Louisiana, although military–civilian conflict continues to hamper the Unionist government. Free-state radicals and black leaders call for political and legal equality, but the Louisiana government takes no action in defining black freedom. The Arkansas Unionist government faces difficulties in asserting its authority, and it receives limited assistance from Federal military officials. In Tennessee, free-state and conservative Unionists offer competing plans for the state to conduct a presidential election, and black Tennesseans in Nashville hold their own election, but Tennessee’s electoral votes ultimately not counted. Andrew Johnson delivers “Moses of the Colored Man” speech during the campaign, affirming commitment to abolition. Republican support for the Thirteenth Amendment muted during the campaign, but Lincoln wins reelection.

The organization of a loyal government on a free-state basis in Louisiana in early 1864 under Lincoln’s ten-percent plan. Contrary to the free-state Unionists’ plan, General Nathaniel Banks orders an election for state executive officers before holding a constitutional convention to abolish slavery. In the campaign that follows, free-state Unionists split into “radical” and “moderate” factions, primarily over black political and legal rights but also over Banks’s interference. Conservative Unionists in Louisiana continue their campaign to restore Louisiana as a slave state, but Congress refuses to seat claimants elected in November 1863. Free-state moderate Michael Hahn is elected Unionist governor in March and takes office. In the planning for a state constitutional convention to abolish slavery, New Orleans free people of color advocate for voting rights, and Lincoln, after meeting with two black leaders, “privately” suggests to Hahn that Louisiana adopt limited black suffrage.

The success of the Federal military campaigns at Vicksburg and Port Hudson (Louisiana) give the Union control of the entire Mississippi River and alter the course of the war. The campaigns also bring about the first substantive combat experience of black soldiers in the war. Tennessee Unionists hold a convention in July 1863 that precipitates the split between free-state and conservative Unionists. In Louisiana, conservative Unionists petition Lincoln to recognize their efforts to organize a loyal, proslavery government, but Lincoln rejects the proposal. Free-state Unionists in Louisiana also develop plans for restoring the state predicated on abolishing slavery.

The lower Mississippi valley, as a distinct geopolitical region, is representative of the antebellum South. Arkansas and Tennessee represents the upper South and Louisiana and Mississippi the lower South. The region demonstrates much geographical diversity, but the main division is between the alluvial areas, where plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings predominate, and the uplands, which feature farming and small-scale slaveholding. The 1.16 million slaves of the region constitute more than a third of the Confederacy’s slave population. The slaveholders of the antebellum South are a distinct elite, especially in the lower Mississippi valley. The slave populations of the region also engender complex communities and a vibrant cultural life. Other than the South Carolina lowcountry and the Chesapeake, the lower Mississippi valley achieves the highest stage of historical development as a slave society within the antebellum South.

Under Andrew Johnson’s policy, Mississippi begins process of Reconstruction, while governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana extend and solidify their authority. Freedpeople mobilize and organize to articulate and instantiate freedom, underscored by black convention in Nashville in August 1865 that calls for political and legal equality. Mississippi Reconstruction convention in August is the first such convention held by unreconstructed state under Johnson’s policy. Convention highlighted by acrimonious debate over abolition of slavery. Some delegates express view – articulated by conservative Unionists – that Emancipation Proclamation had only freed slaves but had not abolished slavery, and that Mississippi is under no obligation to abolish slavery as a condition of restoration to the Union. Mississippi abolishes slavery, but process bodes ill for Johnson’s policy.

Contests between free-state and conservative Unionists in Tennessee and Louisiana continue through summer 1863. Tennessee conservatives conduct a gubernatorial convention that Lincoln refuses to recognize. Despite Lincoln’s rejection, Louisiana conservatives also plan elections for the fall, while free-state Unionists – despite Lincoln’s support – encounter various challenges. Free-state Unionism arises in Arkansas after Federal capture of Little Rock in September 1863. In North, debate over Reconstruction intensifies after Federal victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and antislavery advocates warn against any reunion that does not require rebellious states to abolish slavery in state constitutions, else slavery may survive war. Northern debate over Reconstruction intersects with contest between free-state and conservative Unionists in Louisiana and Tennessee.

The secession crisis of 1860-61 in the lower Mississippi valley represents the crisis in the South as a whole. Secession is more contentious, and southern Unionism more prevalent, in Arkansas and Tennessee than in Louisiana and Mississippi. Support for secession initially corresponds to areas of plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings, but the Confederacy receives overwhelming white support after secession. Events outside the region shape the Union’s initial approach to the rebellion and to the problem of fugitive slaves, though the region also experiences internal disruptions in mobilizing for war. The lower Mississippi valley initially experiences little direct effect from the war, but control of the Mississippi River soon becomes central to Union strategy. By early 1862, preparations were underway for Federal incursions into the region. Although the issue of slavery becomes unavoidable, notions of “Reconstruction” remain limited, and few Northerners envision a reunion predicated on the abolition of slavery.

Following Federal capture of Little Rock, Arkansas Unionists prepare during fall 1863 for free-state convention, to meet in early 1864. Conservative Unionists in Tennessee petition Lincoln to recognize their gubernatorial election, but Federal capture of Chattanooga revives hopes to organize free-state government in Tennessee. Andrew Johnson supports abolition of slavery in Tennessee. Conservative Unionists in Louisiana hold congressional elections in November and send members-elect to Congress. Free-state movement stalls in Louisiana during the fall, and Lincoln places General Nathaniel Banks in charge of organizing free-state government, warning of efforts by proslavery Unionists to organize a loyal government. “Etheridge Plot” features failed attempt by northern Democrats, along with southern and border-state conservative Unionists, to seize control of organizing closely divided House of Representatives in December 1863. Thirteenth Amendment introduced into Congress. Lincoln announces plan for Reconstruction, the ten-percent plan, in December.

This chapter analyzes the efforts of Louis XIV and his successors to create a colonial empire in North America. Through settlement, military might, and Indigenous alliances, France laid claim to territories reaching from Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence to the Great Plains and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to outlining the causes and consequences of these imperial designs, this chapter focuses on the demographic, economic, political, social, and cultural features of the settler colonies established by France, and the relationships that developed between natives and newcomers, especially in the “middle ground” of the fur trade/military frontier in the interior of the continent. Both the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) spread to the colonies, creating havoc for settlers and Indigenous allies alike. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French ceded Newfoundland, Acadie, and Rupert’s Land to Britain but France remained ascendant elsewhere and founded Louisbourg to serve as a major base for the fisheries, as a flourishing entrepôt for North Atlantic trade, and as a vehicle for contesting British claims to North America.

No powerful legal imagining accompanied the colonial ventures of the French old regime, with exploitation of New World resources initiated and controlled by state officials. But operations were badly resourced and conducted by private adventurers and representatives of noble families interested in influence back home. Profits from colonial expansion were to be shared between Paris and powerful interests in the French maritime provinces. Although the Atlantic settlements were legally imagined as overseas parts of the realm, governed by the customs of Paris, in practice, metropolitan control remained weak. Profits from the most lucrative colony, Saint-Domingue, were received from chattel slavery legally organised under the Code noir (1685). Few French lawyers or intellectuals discussed slavery; the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) remained silent about it. The slave revolution of 1791 was largely autonomous, eventually pushing the National Assembly to issue an emancipation decree. After the failure of Napoleon’s effort to recapture the island, Haiti declared independence in 1804. But the first decolonised state remained an international pariah.

Chapter 5 examines the gendered dimensions of maroon communities in America and the wider Atlantic world. Fugitive women joined maroon societies with their husbands and other family members. Runaways were a constant source of anxiety and fear. In the Caribbean and places such as Georgia, Florida, and the Gulf Coast and along the perimeter of the Virginia and North Carolina border in an area known as the Great Dismal Swamp, they were successful in establishing maroon societies. Such societies maintained their cohesiveness for many years. Given that the woods and swamps were spaces where the enslaved could exercise more autonomy than the fields and other open spaces on the plantation, fugitive women had more freedom in these spaces. The Revolutionary War not only prompted an increase in the number of runaways, but also provided the impetus for marronage.