Been in the Storm So Long (76 page)

As long as their servants retained the precious right of mobility, neither the master nor the mistress could determine or control the outcome of domestic conflicts. If servants felt insulted or compromised, or if the employer resorted to the whip, they often chose to leave. Until additional help could be hired, the mistress might try various expedients to fill the gap. Eva Jones distributed the household duties among the remaining servants and even assumed a few of the tasks herself. “Our menage has been frightfully reduced,” she informed her mother-in-law, “and of our numerous throng there remains a seamstress (who has had to lay aside her old calling to become cook, washer, and chambermaid) and one who attends to everything else about this unfortunate establishment.” Nor was it uncommon
to transfer field hands to the house and make domestics of them. To replace the “faithful” Patty, the Grimball family of South Carolina hired a field hand and his family. With less success, Frances Butler Leigh employed several “raw field hands, to whom everything was new and strange, and who were really savages.” Sara Pryor, ill in bed and unable to care for her children, replaced her maid (who left on Christmas morning) with a field hand named Anarchy, but she soon determined that the new servant’s hands, “knotted by work in the fields, were too rough to touch my babe.”
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Unprepared for the frustrations that close contact with whites could provoke, some initiates into domestic service had brief tenures. On a Mississippi plantation, the wife of a field hand was transferred to the house; within a short time, troubles developed, words were exchanged, she claimed she had been insulted, and she left her household duties undone and remained in the quarters “doing nothing.” Some domestics, on the other hand, found even more traumatic a sudden transfer from the house to the fields to replace defecting laborers. Lizzie Hill, who had been a slave in Alabama, remembered vividly the change in her duties after she returned to the plantation to be back with “Old Mistis” again; the position she had previously occupied in the house had been filled, and “I’s had a hard time workin’ in de field.” The more typical experience was that of Dora Franks, a former Mississippi slave, who left her household duties to accompany her brother after the war. Upon resettling on a new plantation, she found herself in the fields and she would never forget her initiation into that kind of labor: “I’d faint away mos’ ever’ day ’bout eleven o’clock. It was de heat. Some of ’em would have to tote me to de house. I’d soon come to. Den I had to go back to de fiel’.” Such considerations may well have been in the minds of some domestic servants when they chose to remain in their same positions after emancipation.
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Now that the last vestiges of old-time fidelity and devotion—however tenuous these proved to be—were being stripped from the master-servant relationship, white families needed to develop new sources of labor. When Gertrude Thomas resorted to hiring, she found herself dismayed by the experiment, and yet she revealed more about her own exploitative standards than the incapacity of the employee.

But to her delight, she managed to hire a cook—an elderly mulatto woman who claimed that her previous employer had sent her off to procure a new position. Unfortunately, when Mrs. Thomas informed her husband of the new acquisition, he insisted that the woman obtain a note from her old employer before he would consent to hire her. This was not an uncommon practice among white families after emancipation, partly a matter of personal security but also intended to check the propensity of newly freed blacks to change or improve their positions. To no one’s surprise, the cook never returned.
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In view of the experiences of some women, Gertrude Thomas might have considered herself fortunate. After hiring new servants, several Florida women found it necessary to count their spoons and forks every night before locking them up in their bedrooms; Julia LeGrand of New Orleans wondered if there was any alternative to “locking up and watching,” and a South Carolina woman complained that her servants “don’t work very hard, but I do.” Emma Holmes would have little to do with her newly hired washer after the woman complained of arduous labor; “we have a constant ebb and flow of servants,” she noted, “some staying only a few days, others a few hours—some thoroughly incompetent, others though satisfactory to us, preferring plantation life.” Not surprisingly, the new servants simply reinforced for many white families the prevailing belief about the incapacity of free blacks for any kind of labor and even provoked some of the old wartime laments. “Three have run away during the last few months that we had clothed up to be decent,” the wife of a North Carolina planter wrote her mother. “They came to us all but naked. They are an ungrateful race. They drive me to be tight and stingy with them.” This woman, until recently a resident of New York, needed little time to learn that the frustrations of the employer class easily cross sectional lines.
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None of this came as any surprise to Grace Elmore. “The negro as a hireling will never answer,” she confided to her diary in May 1865. “They have not principle enough, nor character enough to stand temptation. So long as master and servant were one you could find honesty among the race and even so it was a rarity.” But the times had clearly changed, the old ties had been irrevocably severed, the blacks entertained strange, crude, and false notions about work and freedom, and she doubted if they could really survive the curse of emancipation. “[N]ow that he has power to change his place, and to escape punishment when detected, now that his and the master’s interest are separate and there is no bond but dollars and cents between them, I think the house servants will be chosen from the whites, and that immediately.” Although she had not yet yielded to such logic, she thought it only a matter of time before blacks were forced out of domestic service altogether. After all, she asked, “Who would employ the negro,
unless his slave, in any work that could be done by a white? … Who would choose the black in any capacity except to be held as slave and so bound to her obedient and faithful?”
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T
HE TROUBLESOME QUALITY
of black labor, both in the houses and in the fields, encouraged experiments in the employment of whites for positions traditionally held by blacks. After hiring two white girls, both of whom had been seeking employment at a nearby factory, Donald MacRae, a North Carolina merchant and planter, exulted in that novel feeling of independence from his former slaves. His new servants were not at all disdainful about performing the daily chores, they willingly did the kind of work reserved for blacks, and they claimed competence in spinning, weaving, cooking, washing, housework, tending children, and even plowing. While they remained with him, MacRae felt no need to make any concessions to retain his increasingly restless black help.
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If nothing else, the absence of blacks in a household might soothe otherwise shattered nerves and be a much-welcomed relief from daily irritations. To Ethelred Philips, the Florida farmer and physician, emancipation had resulted in “worthless servants,” and he feared their continued presence in his household. Now that he had hired a white girl, however, “we find it so quiet and so comfortable to be rid of the negro.” He rested much easier about the safety of his family, and he gloated over his pioneering success: “The white women are taking the place of the negroes in our village,” he informed his cousin, “and I take some credit for being the first to make the experiment in the face of every body—not a man but declared it would never do, yet I took a girl about 18 as ignorant and poor as any cornfield negro, but respectable and willing to do any work to support herself and mother and 6 children.” To transform a piney-woods girl into an efficient domestic servant had been no inconsiderable task, but MacRae boasted that his wife, “one of the most industrious and skillful housewives I ever saw, has made her serve her purpose much better than a negro and no darky dares enter my lot for fear of my dog.”
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Within the first year of emancipation, and periodically thereafter, the introduction of whites, especially immigrants, into the fields and households of former slaveholders came to be viewed as a panacea that would surely strengthen the labor system, force the ex-slave to make a realistic accommodation to freedom, and provide white planters with an alternative to the increasingly humiliating and degrading dependency on black labor. That is, the employment of whites, or perhaps only the threat to do so, was a way to control the labor of the freedmen. “If white labor is generally introduced into the upper District,” a South Carolina rice planter vowed, “it will drive the Negro down, and then the competition for labor
will oblige them to work for very little.” White labor, moreover, would provide the permanent and stable working force the South so desperately required for the successful cultivation of its crops. Compared to the freedmen, who “love change, and a month’s work at a place,” white people “love home, take interest in making it pleasant, comfortable—as the spot from which issue all their money and comforts.”
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For those who accepted these assumptions, the proposition made good sense, both racially and economically, and white Southerners certainly enjoyed talking about it. In northern Florida, planters eager for white laborers prepared to apply to New York City for help; a group of Tennessee planters welcomed immigrants from the “industrious Germanic race” to replace “the now indolent negro”; and the Virginia legislature resolved in March 1866 that “the recent radical change in the labor system of the South has rendered the introduction of a new class of laborers necessary.” Principal attention focused for a time on the bold efforts of Mississippi and Alabama planters to import Chinese laborers to work their fields. If racial peculiarities had made black slaves ideal workers, similar characteristics would enable the Chinese to answer the southern need for a docile, tractable, adaptable labor force, with superior enduring powers and less propensity than blacks to fraternize with or intermarry with whites. “We’ve got to change our whole system of labor,” an Alabama planter declared. “Why, I was talking, down to Selma, the other day, with Jim Branson, up from Haynesville. We figured up, I don’t know how many millions of coolies there are in China, that you can bring over for a song. It will take three of’em to do the work of two niggers; but they’ll live on next to nothing and clothe themselves, and you’ve only got to pay ’em four dollars a month. That’s our game now. And if it comes to voting, I reckon we can manage that pretty well!”
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This was bold talk, indeed, and it proved to be mostly talk. How to rid themselves of the presence of the Negro was always a favorite topic of conversation, permitting planters to share their frustrations, anger, and fantasies with others, but few took it seriously. To talk about it perhaps served a therapeutic need, if nothing else. “To get the privilege of governing him [the Negro] as they pleased,” a Freedmen’s Bureau official in Mississippi observed of the local planters, “they will express their anxiety to get rid of him and many other foolish things; but come to the point—they want and must have the negro to work the plantation.” Actually, some Chinese laborers were imported, and small numbers of Swedes, Germans, Dutchmen, and Irishmen were also induced to come to the South. But the results of these experiments were less than gratifying and more often than not failed to meet the expectations or needs of the planters. The new immigrants were no more tractable than many of the freedmen, and replacing troublesome blacks with troublesome immigrants not only made little sense but the cost was apt to be higher. “They cost me $35 each to bring them to Charleston from New York,” a South Carolina planter said of the Dutchmen he had hired. “I fed them far better than ever I thought
of feeding my hands, even gave them coffee and sourkrout, when, what should they do but demand butter for their bread and milk for their coffee, and the next thing the whole crowd left me.” The Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia concluded that recent efforts to recruit foreign immigrants to replace blacks had been unsuccessful, and an English traveler in that state thought he knew why: “Swedes, Germans, and Irishmen had been imported; but the Swedes refused to eat cornbread, the Germans sloped away north-west-ward, in the hope of obtaining homesteads, and the Irishmen preferred a city career. It seems that the South will have need of Sambo yet awhile …” Nor did the attempts to recruit native whites for domestic service successfully overcome the stigma that still attached itself to that kind of labor. “I tried to hire some white women to live with & assist my family with their work,” a South Carolina planter testified. “They do not like the idea of becoming ‘Help.’ ”
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