As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth
century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could
claim. "Degrees of Freedom" compares and contrasts these two
societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship
was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana
and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an
enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of
Mexico, ordinary people--cane cutters and cigar workers,
laundresses and labor organizers--forged alliances to protect and
expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the
twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the
meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the
boundaries placed on citizenship.
Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and
state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal
manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial
conception of the nation. What might explain these differences?
Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of
Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people,
places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies
adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds
also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in
the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns
in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.
Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors
themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and
citizenship in postemancipation societies.
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