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"For the Black men and women who lived to experience the Civil War, there would be the moment when they learned a complex of new truths: they were no longer slaves, they were free to leave the families they had served, they could negotiate the terms of their future labor, and they could aspire to the same rights and privileges enjoyed by their former owners. . . ."Never before had Black people in the South found any reason to view the future with more hope or expectation than in the 1860s. . . . To measure the significance of emancipation is not to compare the material rewards of freedom and slavery, as many contemporaries were apt to do, but to appreciate the many and varied ways in which the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new assumptions upon which they acted."Leon F. Litwack, historian, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, published in 1979

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