Been in the Storm So Long (82 page)

If Union officers eschewed the whip as an instrument of slavery, they did not hesitate to employ familiar military punishments to deal with “disorderly” blacks. “What’s good enough for soldiers is good enough for Niggers,” a sergeant told a Florida woman who had expressed shock over seeing her “negligent” servant hung up by the thumbs. Upon witnessing
a similar punishment meted out to two laborers he had reported for loitering on the job, a South Carolina planter heard them plead to be flogged instead. But if Yankee “justice” dismayed or surprised some native whites, a Mississippi hotelkeeper marveled at the way the local provost marshal had dealt with a “sassy” black who refused to work. “We’ve got a Provo’ in our town,” he boasted, “that settles their hash mighty quick. He’s a downright high-toned man, that Provo’, if he is a Yankee.… He tucked him [the black] up, guv him twenty lashes, and rubbed him down right smart with salt, for having no visible means of support.” That evening, the black victim returned quite willingly to his job.
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Since the early days of occupation, Federal authorities had shared with planters a concern over how to keep the ex-slaves in the fields and impress upon them the necessity of labor. “The Yankees preach nothing but cotton, cotton,” a Sea Islands slave exclaimed, voicing the dismay of many blacks over how quickly their liberators returned them to the familiar routines. Soon after the troops occupied a region, Union officers confronted the problem of what to do with the “contrabands” pouring into their camps. Although many of them were conscripted for military service and labor, the vast majority found themselves working on abandoned and confiscated plantations. The Federal government supervised some of these plantations, while leasing most of them to private individuals, including a number of northern whites intent on maximizing profits as quickly as possible. Thomas W. Knox, a white Northerner who tried his hand at plantation management, characterized most of his colleagues in the business as “unprincipled men” who had little regard for the former slave. “The difference between working for nothing as a slave, and working for the same wages under the Yankees,” he observed, “was not always perceptible to the unsophisticated negro.”
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Small numbers of black farmers also managed to obtain leases, all of them eager to demonstrate the feasibility of free and independent labor. The most successful of such experiments took place at Davis Bend, Mississippi, where blacks secured leases on six extensive plantations, including two belonging to Joe and Jefferson Davis; the blacks repaid the government for the initial costs, managed their own affairs, raised and sold their own crops, and realized impressive profits.
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Whatever the promise of Davis Bend, neither the Union Army nor the Freedmen’s Bureau thought to question the basic assumption underlying the discredited Black Codes—that the ex-slaves were fit only to till the land of others as agricultural laborers and that only compulsion would exact the necessary work and discipline. The proven success of black lessees at Davis Bend and elsewhere, no matter how widely applauded, failed to stem the steady drift toward restoration. Even before the termination of the war, loyal planters and those who took the oath of allegiance to the United States government were permitted to retain their plantations and to work the blacks on a wages or shares basis; Federal officials intervened only to provide planters with the necessary laborers, to suppress any disorders, and to provide guidelines for the management of the ex-slaves. In the view
of some Union officers, only if the former master and his former slaves agreed to a separation should the blacks be permitted to leave the plantations on which they had worked. That was how Emma Holmes interpreted Federal policy in her region, and her mother accordingly reported to the local Union officer a black man who had taken a job elsewhere: “By yesterday morning he had found out the Yankees were his masters, and he walked back here to his work.”
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Based on early experiences with the freedmen, the labor system established during the war by successive Union commanders in Louisiana proved far more typical of the Federal approach than the short-lived Davis Bend experiment. To meet the problem of growing numbers of black refugees and of plantations disrupted by black defections and erratic labor, General Nathaniel P. Banks promised to return the ex-slaves to the fields and to enforce “conditions of continuous and faithful service, respectful deportment, correct discipline, and perfect subordination on the part of the negroes.” The regulations he issued manifested precisely that spirit: a contract system binding the ex-slaves to the land, compensating their labor with wages or shares, and assuring them of just treatment, adequate rations and clothing, medical attention, and education for their children. Although the freedman could select an employer, he was bound to him for the remainder of the year, during which time he was expected to perform “respectful, honest, faithful labor.” To encourage compliance, one half of his wages would be withheld until the end of the season; any black refusing to enter into a contract, violating its terms, or found guilty of “indolence, insolence, and disobedience” would forfeit his pay and be subject to military arrest and employment without wages on public works. Conceding little else to emancipation, the new rules forbade employers from flogging their laborers or separating families; in numerous instances, however, freedmen were returned to their old masters with little concern for their subsequent treatment.
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Even if conceived in “a benevolent spirit,” the labor system envisioned by these regulations struck some black critics as “freedom by toleration” and a “mitigated bondage” analogous to Russian serfdom. That was how the
New Orleans Tribune
, the articulate organ of the free colored community, chose to characterize the new rules. “Strange freedom indeed! Our freedmen, on the plantations, at the present time, could more properly be called, mock freedmen.” If a laborer were truly free, the editor observed, he should be able to choose his place of residence and his trade or occupation, negotiate his own terms with an employer (including wages, conditions, and term of service), and bring court action against anyone who tried to defraud him; moreover, he should be paid the full value of his labor, not a wage stipulated by planters’ meetings or Federal rules. Under the current regulations, the editor contended, blacks would have to work for wages which barely sustained them. But that deplorable fact seemed even less important than the ways in which the new system perpetuated and enforced the dependency of the freedmen on their former masters:

Finally, black critics thought it highly ironic but not altogether surprising that such a labor system should have been instituted and defended by white men who never ceased to display their abolitionist credentials as evidence of their good faith. “I despise a man who pretends to be an abolitionist, and who is only a deepskin abolitionist,” a black clergyman told a meeting in New Orleans called to protest the labor regulations. “We have good friends, who will work with us till this country be a free country; but we have unfaithful friends also. A wolf came, one day, among sheep, in sheep’s clothing; but he had a strange foot, and the sheep wondered at that. We, too, are ready to watch this foot.”
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In defending the labor system of Louisiana, a Union officer not only alluded to his “life-time Anti-Slavery” but curtly dismissed the black critics in New Orleans as “a class of colored people who, with all their admirable qualities, have not yet forgotten that they were, themselves, slaveholders.” But if the urban black elitists could be dismissed, Federal authorities would still have to contend with the black laborers themselves, most of whom had never read a newspaper and needed no one to remind them of the oppressive nature of the system under which they were now told to work. The kind of resistance they undertook varied from mass defections to open revolt; most of them, however, took out their grievances in the erratic work habits about which their employers continued to complain. Rather than submit to the new regulations, the blacks on a plantation south of New Orleans threw down their tools, vowed they would never work under such terms, and “left in a body.” In Plaquemines Parish, field hands lodged the familiar complaint that they had not yet received their share of the previous season’s crops; when they then refused to work, a civilian police officer attempted to arrest the ringleaders, only to find himself “beset upon by at least twenty—with hoes, shovels and hatchets” and forced to leave. Whether directed at specific labor regulations or reflecting general conditions, such outbreaks in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South would require the continued intervention of Federal authorities.
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Neither the charges of black critics nor the resistance of black laborers effected any significant changes in a labor system calculated to subordinate black labor to white planters and lessees. The advocates of that system persisted in the assumption that only coercion and rigid controls could assure the triumph and vindication of free labor in the South. When in mid-1863, at General Banks’s request, two abolitionists evaluated the labor system of Louisiana, they reported with praise that on those plantations where the regulations had been faithfully implemented, the black laborers appeared to be “docile, industrious, & quiet.” By 1865, the initial experiment
in labor relations undertaken in Louisiana had evolved into a system of contracts between laborers and employers not unlike that being instituted elsewhere in the occupied South under the auspices of Federal authorities. Although the format and the specific terms might differ, the nature of the relationship remained essentially the same, as did the role of the Federal government and the sources of black discontent.
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Even as Federal authorities sought to keep the freed slaves on the plantations under a contract labor system, they were not able to guarantee to planters the quality of the labor performed. And to the planter class, caught up in depressed prices and the demands of a free market, that consideration remained critical. “Every abolitionist of New England believes that by thus merely changing slave labor to hireling labor … everything will work well,” Edmund Ruffin of Virginia said of the newly instituted labor system in Louisiana. The assumption would be proven false, he maintained, if only because black workers would “presume on their new rights of freedom” and fail to pass through a necessary “intermediate condition—which would be that of hunger & general privation & suffering, next to starving.” After all, he noted, “few white laborers, of the lowest classes, will labor continuously unless under the compulsion of hunger & suffering of themselves & their familys. Still fewer free negroes will labor without this compulsion.” Rather than view the disaster he predicted for plantation labor, Ruffin chose to put a bullet through his head several months after Appomattox. But few of his fellow planters chose that way out of their dilemma, preferring instead to employ every means at their disposal to regain control over both the movements and the labor of their former slaves.
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W
ITH THE END OF THE WAR
, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) undertook to complete the transition to “free labor” initially begun under the direction of the Union Army. “The freedmen in a few instances are doing well,” Thomas Smith reported in November 1865, not long after he had assumed his post as a Bureau subcommissioner in charge of northern Mississippi. He found many of the freedmen to be “indolent,” some of them “disrespectful and totally unreliable,” and almost all of them “greatly in need of instruction.” But like most Bureau agents, he thought his primary concern was not to make literates of the freed slaves but to teach them to be reliable agricultural laborers. “They have very mistaken notions in regard to freedom.… They ask, ‘What is the value of freedom if one has nothing to go on?’ That is to say if property in some shape or other is not to be given us, we might as well be slaves.” He needed to disabuse their minds of such notions while at the same time restoring their faith in the former masters.
“The colored people lack confidence in the white man’s
integrity;
they fear that, were they to hire to him, and work for him, that he would not pay them for their labor.… The more quickly, and the more perfectly,
that
confidence is restored, the better will it be for all classes.” He could conceive of no more important task he faced in his new position.
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