Abstract

Given racialized chattel slavery’s significance to the US economy, the abolition of slavery necessarily raised a profound question for the nation after the Civil War: How would the United States structure its economy when, for the first time in its history, it could no longer unapologetically exploit the stolen labor of millions of enslaved people? This essay examines a set of radically democratic possibilities for reconstructing the US economy that were unleashed by abolition in the second half of the nineteenth century and that continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century. It analyzes a set of experiments in economic democracy that were catalyzed by emancipation and its economic consequences, examines the twentieth-century legacies of these initial endeavors, and concludes by discussing the ongoing relevance of abolitionist economic democracy in the twenty-first century.