‘… the colored folks form the most interesting spectacle in the South’: conceptualizing race, labor, and travel in postbellum America

1 This paper explores the Reconstruction Era and the late nineteenth century and the importance of movement on the American landscape for newly freed African Americans. Travel is significant in this context as millions of people of color were trying to recover from the ravages of slavery, gain employment, or simply search for a meal; therefore, how travel relates to ideas of freedom and citizenship are examined here. The paper explores how employers and the Freedmen's Bureau manipulated labor requirements, vagrancy and enticement laws, and other restrictive measures affecting the mobility of African Americans. Although the Freedmen's Bureau sought to assist freed African Americans against this virulent racism, their goal of inaugurating a free labor system in the South was restrictive in its own right. This paper argues that the burgeoning of the tourism industry and new trends in journalistic and touristic literary traditions to feed this industry led to a romanticized version of this context that ignore...