The Epilogue gives a brief overview of the main arguments and themes presented in the book, and explores the legacy of debates over British Emancipation within American political culture into the Civil War and Reconstruction. It also examines the unfinished business of the experiment in the British West Indies through the lens of conflicts between freedpeople and the colonial state decades after emancipation.

The chapter provides a transnational perspective on how the apprenticeship’s end caused new challenges for the free labor experiment, as British West Indian colonial economies faltered in the 1840s and former slaves asserted their rights as working people. In their pursuit of expanded liberty, black West Indians forced American antislavery to examine the limitations of a strict free labor ideology, and to envision the experiment’s success on other terms, as the issue of slavery moved to the center of national politics.

This chapter provides a study of commemorations of British Emancipation in the Atlantic world and their political meanings, exploring their transnational divergences and intersections in the cultural production of freedom. Starting with the Caribbean, it examines freedpeople’s celebrations of emancipation and how this at times conflicted with missionary and colonial elites’ directives on how freedom and slavery should be remembered and memorialized. In the United States, it traces the development of celebrations of August 1 and argues that these events arose out of attempts to shape public perceptions on the success of the experiment. August 1 enabled abolitionists and African Americans to publicly merge political and intellectual thoughts with the transnational triumph of British Emancipation toward an antislavery strategy at home.

This chapter examines free African Americans’ perceptions of the emancipated British West Indies. As I argue, beyond many of the concerns of their white abolitionist allies, free African Americans considered the experiment’s implications for their own future prospects of liberty, racial equality, and citizenship rights in the United States. In their autonomous newspapers, speeches, and print publications, they touted the success of the emancipated British West Indies as evidence against notions of black inferiority and as a model for participatory citizenship. But this narrative was complicated by a short-lived but provocative West Indian Emigration Scheme of the late 1830s, stimulating heated debates in the black press that reveal the limits of transnational identity.

The chapter traces the project of reforming the Anglo-West Indies from early missionary efforts through the post-emancipation. Abolitionists’ assessments of moral reform in the British colonies served as a compelling argument of the experiment’s success. In the United States, influenced by the Great Awakening, morality, religious instruction, education, and spiritual uplift were appealing indicators on the success or failure of emancipation. Some American reformers journeyed to the West Indies to take part in this “civilizing mission.” But as I argue, freedpeople had their own perceptions of moral behavior, challenging the expectations of reformers in both England and America.

The chapter provides a study of how the apprenticeship implemented through much of the emancipated British West Indies posed problems for the free labor defense of the experiment, as it sought to maintain the structures of slavery — in deed if not in name. None understood this better than former slaves, who viewed the repression doled out by magistrates and planters as a subversion of both labor and freedom. Through testimonies and acts of resistance, I illustrate how freedpeople forced an end to the apprenticeship even as American abolitionists sought to use their laboring potential as a defense of the experiment.

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.

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.

Administrative conflict and confusion between Federal military and civil authorities in southern Louisiana in overseeing plantations, as preparations made for 1865. Sugar planters reiterate demand for labor and racial control with slavery abolished. Some former slaveholders express view that slavery might be salvaged. Planters and freedpeople in cotton region also contest features of new labor and racial order. Following Confederate capitulation in the west, Federal military forces assume control of entire lower Mississippi valley and emancipate enslaved people still under Confederate authority. Freedmen’s Bureau begins to establish itself and to institute free labor arrangements. White Southerners respond to military defeat and the end of slavery with anger and violence, and many vow that slavery will be reestablished once Federal military presence ends.

Exercising physical and occupational mobility is often understood as central to Black freedom on a national scale. Mobility as “freedom to move” is also, as Janaka Bowman Lewis argues in this chapter, central to gendered practices of Black geography. By taking up Charlotte Forten as a case study illuminated by a host of African American women’s geographical practices at mid-century, Bowman Lewis argues for a distinct narrative genre and an understanding of mobility as far more than physical movement, proposing that “mid-century Black women’s narratives of education, individual progress, marriage and family, labor, and intellectual commitments more widely … both reflected and produced national and community rebuilding projects.” Bowman Lewis considers the ways in which Black women exercised their autonomous personhood through quotidian practices, in place, as well as through physical mobility through space. For her, Forten’s participation in the Port Royal project is no more significant a practice than those she watches Sea Island women undertake, and in fact it is through her acts of observation – not necessarily through her movement – that Forten is led to a self-realization or actualization of freedom.