From slave to landowner : how black farmers used tenant farming as a stepping stone Nelson County, Virginia 1865-1910

Pleasant Wood worked as a slave on a farm in Nelson County, Virginia until he was twenty-eight years old. The end of the Civil War and the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abruptly altered his life. Formerly a person with no legal identity, trapped in a system of enforced economic dependence, Wood legally became a full citizen.