While the official story of American equality narratives is one that portrays an arc from lesser to greater equality, liberty and agency over time, largely facilitated by the intervention of positive legal reforms, this official story is more fiction than reality - particularly for groups of people who migrate from the status of legal outsider to insider. Underlying these liberal equality narratives are implicit assumptions that greater agency and freedom are to be found as one's status "improves" from that of the subordinate to that of full citizen.

My examination of the experiences of African Americans in the immediate post-bellum U.S. South demonstrates the mythic nature of this liberal progress narrative, For many freed men and women, induction into the community of citizens was predicated upon their willingness to comply with the regulatory demands of a juridical bureaucratic state grounded in the myth of free labor and restrictive Victorian familial norms. Those who refused to "act like citizens" voluntarily were coerced to do so through the vigorous enforcement of criminal laws.

My research has focused primarily upon the celebrated award of the right to marry to freed men and women in the immediate post-bellum period. I will argue this panel that their experience demonstrates the fallacy of linear progress marked by greater freedom and agency. The new regulatory relationship with the state that was created by virtue of emancipation and the possibility of citizenship, inaugurated new opportunities for regulation of the intimate lives of freed people (adultery, fornication and bigamy prosecutions) as well as incentivized intra-community enforcement of Victorian sexual norms-thereby creating "good Blacks" and "bad Blacks" as recognizable cultural subjects. In this sense, the fiction of enhanced agency is reinforced to a greater degree by intra-community self-regulation/voluntary choice to conform, than by extra-community enforcement of marital norms through resort to criminal laws.

The experiences of freed people in the post-bellum period hold out important lessons for others engaged in liberal law reform, particularly when grounded in promises of respectability.