Emancipation, the Ager Publicus, and Black Political Thought

Abstract

After the Civil War, Black newspapers, from the Loyal Georgian to the San Francisco Elevator, encouraged lawmakers to leverage public land as a means of emancipation. Drawing on neoclassical agrarian theories that link civil freedom to a wide distribution of property, African American writers made a case for treating tens of millions of acres—including abandoned plantations—as an ager publicus for the settlement of Black homesteads and the creation of free schools. Seen within a broader agenda centered on civil rights expansion, the land reform proposals of the Black press point to a distinctively republican understanding of freedom, encompassing the positive rights of both self-government and economic independence, which defied the late nineteenth-century rise of both laissez-faire liberalism and socialism within American political thought. These aspirations, moreover, provide a historically grounded benchmark by which to assess the achievements and setbacks of the postbellum era.