Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And for white Northerners looking at the South who are committed to free labor, the idea is, well,
Black Southerners now have the right to negotiate a contract or they can do something else.
That's up to them.
But of course, they don't have other options because as enslaved people, they legally couldn't own property and they enter the post-war era without the resources to manage on their own.
And white Southerners are very reluctant to sell them land.
So free labor, which the Republican Party commits itself to in a very narrow way, Eric Foner's brilliant book, Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men chronicles this.
it becomes increasingly really irrelevant in that post-war order where you have monopolies, where you have economies of scale that some corporations employ thousands of people.
And turning that sort of ideology or that approach to labor in the market to the South leaves Black Southerners exposed to a very, very difficult way to make enough money to actually feed your family and hopefully improve your condition.
And so the rise of sharecropping is an inevitable result and a kind of economic exploitation that is so damaging, not just to Black Southerners, but to the whole Southern economy and social order for decades.
Yes.
That's all born out of this sort of encounter.
I
Yeah, the lack of opportunity.
I mean, there's a famous early movement of that called the Exodusters, which are 20 or 30,000 Black Southerners who moved to Kansas, the kind of middle of the country, who come to be called Exodusters.
And they're very clearly reacting to the fact that there is simply no economic opportunities for them in the way that there are for white Southerners.
And this is always the perpetual fear among white elites is what happens if the Black population, who we regard as the workforce of the South, leaves?
And
a fear that continues all the way into the 1920s and 1930s.
It's the reason there's no mechanization in southern agriculture, because you can continue to pay someone a dollar a day to hoe cotton.
It gives you social control over them.
Showing 181–200 of 924 · page 10 of 47
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