Description: Seizing the New Day sheds light on the strategies used by former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina to adjust to freedom and the efforts they made to battle whites' attempts to regain control. Using autobiographies, slave narratives, Freedmen's Bureau letters and papers, traveler's accounts, journals, diaries, personal letters and newspapers, Jenkins focuses on the freedmen's hopes and aspirations. A thread running throughout the narrative is the determination of Charleston's freedmen to seize control over their own lives. The city's black population expected full citizenship and equal economic, social, and educational opportunities. Discovering that these goals were not shared by most whites, they crafted means to obtain their desired ends.

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