Been in the Storm So Long (90 page)

With the advent of paid labor, planters and freedmen failed to agree even among themselves on the respective merits of compensation in cash wages or in shares of the crop. To the planters, many of them desperately short of cash after the war, payment in shares reflected at first nothing more than economic necessity. But some came to prefer this method of payment, thinking it might ensure a more stable work force and stimulate the freedmen by giving them “an interest and pride in the crop.” The planters who remained skeptical feared that payment in shares would encourage the hands to think they had an interest in the land as well as the crop, make them even more presumptuous and independent, and increase the difficulty of discharging inefficient workers. Both methods of payment remained popular, with some planters trying both at various times and assessing the results. That neither system exacted the desired amount of labor they attributed largely to the freedman’s slovenly work habits and racial traits rather than to his inevitable disappointment on payday. Based upon the freedman’s experience with wages or shares, the issue took on growing importance in the negotiations that preceded a new contract.
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Although running the risk of having a Federal official disallow the contract, some planters tried to capitalize on the freedman’s illiteracy and the Freedmen’s Bureau’s indifference. On one plantation, the contract awarded to the laborers one third of seven twelfths of the crop; in another
instance, four freedmen contracted to work for one fifth of one third of the crop and failed to realize their error until the final settlement. “Contracts which were brought to me for approval contained all sorts of ludicrous provisions,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in South Carolina recalled. “The idea seemed to be that if the laborer were not bound body and soul he would be of no use.” The rumors that circulated among freedmen that a contract would bind them for life or a seven-year apprenticeship were based in part on the efforts of certain employers to do precisely that. “Master,” an Alabama freedman declared as he packed his belongings to leave the plantation, “they say if we make contracts now, we’ll be branded, and made slaves again.” Some Bureau officials spent nearly as much time reassuring freedmen on this point as they did explaining the terms of contracts.

In numerous instances, however, freedmen affixed their names to contracts which only perpetuated the terms by which they had served as slaves. “Heap of ’em, round here, just works for their victuals and clothes, like they always did,” a South Carolina planter observed. “I reckon they’ll all be back whar they was, in a few years.”
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Although designed to protect the interests of planters and freedmen alike, the contract in practice gave employers what they had wanted all along—the crucial element of control by which they could bind the ex-slaves for at least a year and compel them to work and maintain proper behavior. Nor did the presence of a Freedmen’s Bureau officer necessarily make the contracts any less oppressive; after all, one agent conceded, the objective of the contract was to prevent black laborers from deserting their employers “at a critical time” in the making of the crop. Whatever the initial intent, the contract system embodied that universally accepted dictum that only compulsion and discipline could induce free blacks to work. Unlike the northern worker who entered into a verbal contract with an employer, the black laborer in the postwar South was bound by a legal instrument which not only stipulated objective terms of service (compensation, hours, and duties) but imposed conditions of demeanor and attitude on the laborer and not on the employer. That feature in itself made the question of compliance or noncompliance necessarily arbitrary and revealed the contract as something less than a bilateral agreement between equals. In so many ways, in fact, the new arrangements simply institutionalized the old discipline under the guise of easing the ex-slave’s transition to freedom. After comparing the regulations under slavery with those which now controlled free labor, the
New Orleans Tribune
found but few differences: “All the important prohibitions imposed upon the slave, are
also enforced against the freedman.… It is true that the law calls him a freeman; but any white man, subjected to such restrictive and humiliating prohibitions, will certainly call himself a slave.”
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By hedging the freedman’s newly acquired rights, by narrowing his room for maneuverability, by robbing him of his principal bargaining strengths, by seeking to control both his social behavior and his labor, the contract between a former master and his former slaves reminded one observer of a “patent rat-trap.” No one, he noted, could have devised a surer instrument to compel black labor. “Rats couldn’t possibly get out of it. The only difficulty was that they declined to go in.”
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O
NCE THE CONTRACT
had been prepared, the employer assembled the laborers on his place (most of them his former slaves), explained the terms, and urged them to sign. The response was likely to be mixed, with some freedmen walking back to their quarters only to pack their belongings and take to the road, unwilling to commit their labor and lives to an agreement they could not even read. The very formality, obscure legalisms, and binding nature of the contract provoked skepticism and dismay, even in exslaves who fully intended to remain with their former master. In Burke County, Georgia, Willis Bennefield would have nothing to do with a contract. “What you want me to sign for? I is free,” he told the man who had owned him as a slave. Nor did the master’s explanation that the contract held both of them to their word satisfy him. “If I is already free, I don’t need to sign no paper,” he insisted. “If I was workin’ for you and doin’ for you befo’ I got free, I kin do it still, if you wants me to stay wid you.” If he refused to sign a contract, his mother warned him, he might forfeit his pay. “Den I kin go somewheh else,” the ex-slave replied.
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Rather than objecting to a specific clause, large numbers of freedmen feared that the contract, as a binding legal agreement, compromised their newly won liberties, and perhaps even forfeited their rights to the expected distribution of land among them. In his section of Virginia, a Union officer reported, the blacks refrained from contracting for any length of time “in the expectation of some indefinable but great benefits to be bestowed on them by the Government.” Nor would they place any great faith in the employer’s assurance that the contract protected their best interests. The freedmen lacked confidence “in the white man’s
integrity
,” a Bureau commissioner in Mississippi concluded, and the suspicion, other agents reported, often extended to “papers of any description, in which their former masters are in any way concerned.” On Edisto Island, South Carolina, several freedmen declared at a meeting with Federal officials that they bore no personal enmity toward their old masters but they had no desire to contract with men who had once owned and abused them, or even with
those who might have treated them reasonably well but in whom they had no confidence.
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With numbers of ex-slaves refusing to sign contracts, many of them hoping to obtain better terms, the planter class counted heavily on the ultimate weapons of necessity and compulsion. To hasten that moment of decision, Federal authorities complied all too readily with the demands of planters that they apprehend black vagrants and cease issuing food rations to freedmen, thereby forcing them to depend once again upon their old masters for daily subsistence. Ironically, that policy accorded with the growing conviction of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern freedmen’s aid societies that to distribute food and clothing among the ex-slaves made them less independent, reduced their incentives to work, and demoralized them. “The most dangerous process through which the negro goes when he becomes a freedman is that of receiving the gratuities of benevolence in the shape of food and clothing,” a missionary wrote late in 1865. “If you wish to make them impudent, fault-finding and lazy, give them clothing and food freely.” Once the freedmen had to depend upon his bounty, the planter reasoned, he had only to withhold such support to induce his laborers to agree to terms. That proved to be a sound conclusion, though the results were not always gratifying. When Stephen Doan, a South Carolina proprietor, decided to withhold food rations to force his men to abide by a contract, they killed him.
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To counter the freedman’s principal bargaining strength—the threat to take his labor to the highest bidder—planters often effected combinations or understandings among themselves not to contract with any former slave who failed to produce a “consent paper” or a proper discharge from his previous owner. The white citizens of Nelson County, Virginia, acting “to prevent improper interference with each other’s arrangements,” resolved that “in
no case”
would they hire a laborer who failed to supply “a certificate of character, and of permission to rehire himself.” More often, as in the Clarendon district of South Carolina, local planters simply reached a verbal understanding “not to hire their neighbour’s negroes.”
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Such an agreement, in one bold stroke, would effectively reduce the freedman’s chances of either improving or changing his position, while it obviously enhanced a planter’s ability to exact for himself the most favorable terms. “The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live,” vowed the owner of a cotton factory and two plantations in Alabama.

Appreciating the need to coordinate their efforts, planters in numerous regions also met to fix maximum wages, to draw up model contracts,
to agree on penalties for violations of contracts, and to pledge themselves not to lease or rent any land to a freedman. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau frowned upon such combinations and in some instances banned them, local agents might choose to look the other way; after all, the ends they wished to achieve were almost identical. In Clarke County, Alabama, a Labor Regulating Association formed by local planters appeared to be on good terms with the Bureau agent and hoped to obtain his approval for apprenticing the orphan children of ex-slaves. But even where the Bureau broke up such combinations, planters kept themselves informed of what their neighbors were paying and paid no more. Still other pressures were brought to bear on recalcitrant blacks. In a South Carolina community, physicians agreed not to treat freedmen unless the planters authorized their visits. “They adopt this course,” a local resident explained, “to bring to the notice of the negroes, their dependent condition & to check the feeling of irresponsibility now prevalent.” And if other measures proved unavailing, some employers, particularly in areas remote from a Freedmen’s Bureau office, had no hesitation in employing violent methods to force their laborers to agree to terms. In Surrey County, Virginia, a black farmer testified, “they are taking the colored people and tying them up by the thumbs if they do not agree to work for six dollars a month; they tie them up until they agree to work for that price, and then they make them put their mark to a contract.… A man cannot endure it long.” In some regions, patrols of white men meted out summary justice to blacks who were not under contract to an employer or who were found to be in violation of a contract.
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Although the vast majority of freedmen eventually agreed to terms, that hardly ended the difficulties. During the first postwar agricultural season, with both sides testing the effects of emancipation, the reports mounted of freedmen unable to appreciate the binding character of a contract and leaving the plantations “on the most trifling pretext” before their terms of service had expired. (One planter still referred to such workers as “runaways.”) “They are constantly striking for higher wages,” a Georgian observed of the black laborers in his state.

The most persistent complaints revolved around those laborers who remained on the plantations, worked “only when they please, and as little as they please,” feigned sickness to avoid labor, and had a habit of carrying pistols with them to the fields (allegedly to shoot stray rabbits or squirrels). Unaccustomed to black labor, a northern lessee and former abolitionist who operated a plantation in Georgia found himself annoyed by the sight
of laborers dropping their shovels and hoes in the fields to sing “a religious song.” Still other employers fretted over the propensity of their workers to do as little as possible in the expectation of “a better time coming”—the anticipated division of the land among the freedmen.
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“Every contract made in 1865 has been broken by the freedmen,” a Freedmen’s Bureau agent reported from the Georgetown district of South Carolina, and one local proprietor, Jane Pringle, derived little satisfaction from the willingness of Federal authorities to arrest and jail black violators: “Of what earthly benefit is it to us that men who should be laboring are thrown into prison, they can’t till the land there and I assure you that a prison life is rather a pleasure to a negro than a punishment, since they are fed without working.” As an alternative to the “tedious law process,” she proposed the establishment of military posts “at small distances for instant relief” and “double labor on the land” as proper punishment.
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