Landscapes of Freedom

Restoring the History of Emancipation and Citizenship in Yorktown, Virginia, 1861–1940

Rebecca Capobianco Toy

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781643365923, 9781643365343
• eBook ISBN: 9781643365824
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historic Preservation in Architecture
• Index: History

Revelations of the profound effect and long legacy of America's post–Civil War Reconstruction

In Landscapes of Freedom, Rebecca Capobianco Toy tells the story of an emblematic community of freedpeople during the Civil War era. Some of the earliest acts of wartime emancipation happened in the Tidewater of Virginia, where enslaved people voted with their feet and escaped the Confederacy by crossing into US Army lines. At Yorktown, Virginia, freedpeople developed their own self-governing enclave near (and in some cases on) the Revolutionary War battlefield. Toy describes that Black community, its formation, and its development well into the twentieth century. She traces the effect of Reconstruction policy and the consequences that its subsequent rollback had on the lives of Black citizens.

Toy also documents the Black community's attempts to commemorate its members' role in the Civil War. The Black community fought to retain that memory, one that challenged not only the Lost Cause interpretation of the war but also the federal government's efforts to privilege the Revolutionary memory of Yorktown while ignoring its ongoing role in the story of American freedom.

Table of contents

• Landscapes of Freedom
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “They Appear like Freemen”: Establishing a Free Black Community in Wartime
• Chapter 2. “How Much We Can Do Ourselves”: Creating Institutions to Sustain a Community
• Chapter 3. “We Can Take Care of Ourselves Now”: Establishing Independent Labor and Industry
• Chapter 4. “They Were Now Citizens”: Defining Civil Rights in the Freedmen’s Bureau Court
• Chapter 5. “We Have a Right to the Land”: Resisting Relocation in the Postwar Period
• Chapter 6. Landscapes of Freedom, Landscapes of Memory
• Chapter 7. “We Build Our Memorial in Our Lives”: Postwar Politics and the Continued Fight for Equality
• Conclusion: The Coming of the National Park Service
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index