THE MEANING OF FREEDOM ★^567Blacks relished the opportunity
to demonstrate their liberation from
the regulations, significant and trivial,
associated with slavery. They openly
held mass meetings and religious ser-
vices free of white supervision, and
they acquired dogs, guns, and liquor,
all barred to them under slavery. No
longer required to obtain a pass from
their owners to travel, former slaves
throughout the South left the planta-
tions in search of better jobs, family
members, or simply a taste of personal
liberty. Many moved to southern towns
and cities, where, it seemed, “freedom
was free- er.”
Families in Freedom
With slavery dead, institutions that
had existed before the war, like the
black family, free blacks’ churches and
schools, and the secret slave church,
were strengthened, expanded, and freed from white supervision. The family
was central to the postemancipation black community. Former slaves made
remarkable efforts to locate loved ones from whom they had been separated
under slavery. One northern reporter in 1865 encountered a freedman who
had walked more than 600 miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching
for the wife and children from whom he had been sold away before the war.
Meanwhile, widows of black soldiers successfully claimed survivors’ pensions,
forcing the federal government to acknowledge the validity of prewar relation-
ships that slavery had attempted to deny.
But while Reconstruction witnessed the stabilization of family life, free-
dom subtly altered relationships within the family. Emancipation increased
the power of black men and brought to many black families the nineteenth-
century notion that men and women should inhabit separate “spheres.”
Immediately after the Civil War, planters complained that freedwomen had
“withdrawn” from field labor and work as house servants. Many black women
preferred to devote more time to their families than had been possible under
slavery, and men considered it a badge of honor to see their wives remain at
home. Eventually, the dire poverty of the black community would compel a
What visions of freedom did the former slaves and slaveholders pursue in the postwar South?Family Record, a lithograph marketed to former
slaves after the Civil War, is an idealized portrait
of a middle- class black family, with scenes of
slavery and freedom.