5. “Chased Out on the Slippery Ice”

This chapter examines how landless workers survived in an economy whose defining characteristics were scarcity and uncertainty. Unskilled and unorganized, rural free laborers faced a desperate struggle for survival; they were buffeted by seasonal and cyclical unemployment, and their nonwage economic activities were constricted by a legal system that was designed to maintain slaveholders' authority. The prospects for single women and free African Americans were particularly dim in a labor market that restricted their opportunities in favor of white men, thus limiting their options and relegating them to the margins of the rural economy. In the end, these workers were often left with the mere gleanings of freedom.