Been in the Storm So Long (81 page)

F
ACED WITH
troublesome laborers after the war, a Louisiana sugar planter mused over the changed situation and how he would have dealt with such problems in better days. “Eaton [an overseer] must find it very hard to lay aside the old strap—As for myself, I would give a good deal to amuse myself with it, a little while. I have come to the conclusion that the great secret of our success was the great motive power contained in that little instrument.” Few of the former slaveholders would have disputed that observation. To maintain a disciplined and docile labor force, they had long acknowledged their reliance on “the power of fear.” Nor had the emancipation of the slaves lessened the need to exercise their traditional prerogatives. “They can’t be governed except with the whip,” one planter explained. “Now on my plantation there wasn’t much whipping, say once a fortnight; but the negroes knew they would be whipped if they didn’t behave themselves, and the fear of the lash kept them in good order.”
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When Federal officials suspended the newly enacted Black Codes, southern whites greeted the decision with predictable expressions of dismay but few were altogether surprised and some felt the states had acted foolishly. But when Federals in some regions reprimanded employers for using the whip on black laborers or forbade any kind of corporal punishment, that was truly hard to accept—even to comprehend. “I know the nigger,” a Mississippi planter pleaded with a Freedmen’s Bureau official. “The employer must have some sort of punishment. I don’t care what it is. If you’ll let me tie him up by the thumbs, or keep him on bread and water, that will do.… All I want is just to have it so that when I get the niggers on to my place, and the work is begun, they can’t sit down and look me square in the face and do nothing.”
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To manage black laborers, numerous planters agreed, was not unlike handling mules; both could be stubborn, even insolent, and experience suggested that they were most serviceable and contented when they had “plenty of feed, plenty of work, and a little licking.” What these planters now demanded was simply the necessary authority to exact the fear and
the deference always considered essential to racial control. Like the Black Codes, corporal punishment would benefit the blacks by restraining their worst passions and forcing them to acknowledge authority. “A nigger has got to know you’re his master,” a Georgia planter still insisted, “and then when he understands that he’s content.” Still another former slaveholder attributed his postwar success in managing thirty-five freedmen to their
fear
of punishment: “You see I never let myself down to ’em.”
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If the old discipline in any way contradicted the new freedom, few of the former slaveholders cared to admit it. To them, emancipation had only made more urgent the need to exercise traditional authority. Although employers made less use of the whip than before the war, they managed to find equally effective and less controversial alternatives. After serving a fifteen-day jail sentence for lashing a former slave (“was there ever such a damned outrage!”), a South Carolina planter claimed to have “larnt a trick” that exacted the proper respect of his blacks. “I jest strings ’em up by the thumbs for ’bout half an hour, an’ then they are damned glad to go to work.” Since the Union Army used that method to discipline its own men as well as recalcitrant blacks, the South Carolinian obviously expected no interference. Fearful of whipping their freed slaves, lest they lodge a complaint with Federal officials, some planters took out their frustrations in verbal abuse. “Can’t lick free niggers, but I don’t know if there’s any law ag’in cussin’ ’em, and I believe it does ’em a heap o’ good,” a Georgian suggested to a group of fellow planters. “It’s next best to lickin’. Jest cuss one o’ ’em right smart for ’bout five minutes, and he’ll play off peart.” Unfortunately for this planter, emancipation had left him without a black to curse and he could only fantasize about how to bring the freedmen under control. “I should like to lick a hundred free negroes jest once all ’round. If I didn’t bring ’em to know their places, I’d pay ten dollars apiece for all I failed on.”
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The degree to which emancipation altered the day-to-day behavior and temperament of the former slaveholder became a matter of immediate concern to black men and women. On numerous farms and plantations, they soon discovered that the potential of the white family for volatile behavior had in no way been abated and it seemed like the old times again. Katie Darling, a former Texas slave, remembered staying with her “white folks” for six years after the war “and missy whip me jist like she did ’fore.” If Anna Miller perceived any change in her master after emancipation, it was only his rapid mental deterioration. “De marster gets worser in de disposition and goes ’roun’ sort of talkin’ to hisse’f and den he gits to cussin’ ev’rybody.” Within a year after vowing that he would not live in a country “whar de niggers am free,” her master killed himself.
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The previous behavior of their masters, as many ex-slaves suddenly discovered, often proved an unreliable guide to how they would now conduct themselves and manage their freed blacks. Frank Fikes, for example, claimed to have suffered few hardships or beatings as a slave. “Old miss and mars was not mean to us at all until after surrender and we were freed.
We did not have a hard time until after we were freed. They got mad at us because we was free …” Nor were some of the former masters oblivious to how emancipation could work curious changes in their attitudes and temperament. When he had held slaves, a South Carolina planter recalled, he had always thought of himself as a model master and only once had he resorted to whipping one of his blacks. But now, in his relations with these same people as freedmen and freedwomen, he found himself increasingly moody and temperamental. On one occasion, he misinterpreted what a former slave told him and had to be restrained by several friends who were present from shooting the man on the spot; instead, he calmed himself by administering 130 lashes to him, “hard as I could lay on.” But if the whipping relieved this planter of his anger, it also left him displeased with his loss of self-control. “I was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That’s the way we treat our servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used to the new order of things,—if we ever can.”
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Although Federal officials were inclined to overlook how an employer chose to discipline his laborers, the blacks themselves refused to be passive spectators. If a planter relied on the old discipline, confident that fear and punishment could still maintain a captive labor force, he might discover that his intended victims, often his former slaves, no longer felt compelled to submit. After what they had endured as slaves, they saw no reason to tolerate such treatment as freedmen. “Damn him,” a South Carolina black remarked after an altercation with his old master, “he never done nufin all his damned life but beat me and kick me and knock me down; an’ I hopes I git eben with him some day.” In Mississippi, an overseer who responded to a disobedient field hand by threatening him with an ax suddenly found himself facing the laborer’s daughter and several other blacks, all of them holding axes. “I had to run for my life,” the overseer testified. On the Brokenburn plantation in Louisiana, John B. Stone, the highly temperamental son of the mistress, shot a black youth after an argument in the fields. That so infuriated the other hands that they turned upon Stone and might have killed him had not some others intervened. Still, Kate Stone would never forget the sight of her brother being escorted to the house by “a howling, cursing mob with the women shrieking, ‘Kill him!’ and all brandishing pistols and guns.” The family thought it best to send John away to school, at least until a semblance of calm had been restored. Upon his return, he seemed a much-changed and subdued young man. “He never speaks now of killing people as he formerly had a habit of doing,” his sister wrote of him.
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If open resistance invited severe reprisals, the freedmen could exercise the power to withhold their labor or leave the premises and never return. The ties that kept former slaves on the plantation were often so tenuous that an employer’s threat or attempt to inflict punishment might end the relationship altogether. Faced with the imminent loss of their laborers, many a former master and mistress suddenly became “very con’scending” after the war, learned to address their blacks in terms of respect, and
banished both the whip and the overseer. “I told my overseer the old style wouldn’t do,—the niggers wouldn’t stand it,—and he promised better fashions,” an Alabama planter remarked; “but it wasn’t two days before he fell from grace, and went to whipping again. That just raised the Old Scratch with them; and I don’t blame ’em.” In explaining the changed attitudes of their old masters, some former slaves suggested that fear itself could have been a motivating factor. “He never was mean to us after freedom,” a former Tennessee slave recalled, along with the many beatings she had once endured. “He was ’fraid the niggers might kill him.” Rather than trust their former master to exercise proper judgment, many blacks extracted from him, as a condition of employment, assurances that he would refrain from corporal punishment and discharge the overseer.
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By these and other demands, the freedmen suggested the need not only to abolish the relics of bondage but to give substance to their position as free workers, with the same rights and prerogatives they had observed white laborers exercising. Nowhere would they manifest this determination more vividly than in the new economic arrangements they worked out with their employers. Unfortunately, the former slaveholding class seemed in many respects less equipped to make the transition to freedom than their former slaves. No matter how hard some tried, few of them were capable of learning new ways and shaking off the old attitudes. Even if they could, they found themselves increasingly trapped into an untenable position. Desperately needing to exact enough labor from their former slaves to meet a brutally depressed market, employers now encountered free workers who looked first to their own subsistence and refused to work up to an exploitative level they deemed incompatible with their new status. When these conflicting needs created an impasse, as they often did, the employer class was forced to look elsewhere for the kind of compulsion and guidance that might once again produce a stable and tractable labor force. How ironic that none other than the much-hated Yankee conquerors should have ultimately shown them the way.

N
OT LONG AFTER
Federal authorities set aside the Black Code of South Carolina, Armisted Burt, who had helped to frame the new laws, noted with obvious satisfaction that the Union commander had ordered freedmen to contract with an employer or be sentenced to hard labor on public projects. “I have no doubt the Yankees will manage them,” he concluded. The confidence he expressed was not misplaced. No matter how much whites chafed under military rule and occupation, the planter class—native whites and northern lessees alike—often acknowledged its indebtedness to the Union Army for controlling the otherwise restless and rebellious dispositions of the freed slaves. After conversing with the local
commander on steps that had been taken to suppress a feared black uprising, the manager of a plantation in low-country South Carolina breathed much easier: “Our people object to the troops being sent here. I thank God they are here.” No sooner were cases of “insubordination” reported to Federal authorities, a Georgia clergyman and planter informed his sister, than forceful steps were taken to suppress the troublemakers. “The effect has been a remarkable quietude and order in all this region. The Negroes are astounded at the idea of being whipped by Yankees. (But keep all this a secret, lest we should be deprived of their services. I have not called on them yet, but may have to do so.)”
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If the Black Codes had not been the edicts of legislatures dominated by ex-Confederate leaders, they might not have suffered the fate of nullification. The problem lay not so much in specific provisions as in what the total product came to symbolize to the victorious North—white southern intransigence and unrepentance in the face of military defeat. But the suspension of the Codes in no way diminished the need to reactivate and control black labor. Almost every Federal official recognized that necessity, and Union commanders moved quickly to expel former plantation hands from the towns and cities, to comply with the requests of planters to force their blacks to work, and to punish freedmen for disobedience, theft, vagrancy, and erratic labor.
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“Their idea of freedom,” the provost marshal of Bolivar County, Mississippi, said of the recently freed slaves, “is that they are under no control; can work when they please, and go where they wish.… It is my desire to apply the Punishments used in the Army of the United States, for offences of the Negroes, and to make them do their duty.” Empowered to settle disputes between employers and laborers, the provost marshals invariably sustained the authority of the planters. In Louisiana, for example, plantation laborers testified to the hopelessness of appealing any grievances they might have to the nearest Federal official: