Been in the Storm So Long (97 page)

Few gave up the struggle with greater reluctance and internal torment than Mary Jones, the deeply religious owner of three plantations in Liberty County, Georgia. After the death of her husband in 1863, she had resolved to carry on the family tradition of paternal affection and beneficent regard for the black children of God. If only they had not also been her laborers, acting all too often as adult men and women, the rewards might have been greater. The plantations languished, the freedmen manifested their discontent
with the conditions of labor, and an incident early in 1866 proved to be a turning point. Shortly after two blacks—July and Jesse—asked to see a copy of the contract, the black foreman reported to his employer that the laborers “one and all” refused to work; they were dissatisfied with the contract and thought she intended to deceive them. Along with July and Jesse (whom she suspected as the “ringleaders”), Mary Jones proceeded to the nearest office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, where the local agent advised them that the contract was perfectly legal, even if other planters in the area had offered a greater share of the crop to their laborers. That ended the affair and the freedmen returned to work, but for Mary Jones it had obviously been a demeaning experience.

The relief this may have afforded Mary Jones failed to instill in her workers any greater appreciation for the conditions under which they labored. Several months after the incident, Charles C. Jones, Jr., advised his mother to avoid still another skirmish with the “ingrates” and sell the plantations. Problems would persist everywhere in the South, he warned, as long as whites allowed themselves to be “led by the Negroes” rather than direct and control their labor.

But Mary Jones held on, sustained by her faith in “His infinite wisdom and special guidance,” even as she lost all faith in the ability of her former slaves to become intelligent and reliable free workers.

After still more outbreaks of disaffection (“they dispute even the carrying out and spreading the manure”), new fears (“they all bear arms of some sort”), new losses (“Gilbert is very faithful, and so is Charles. They are the exceptions”), she acceded to her son’s warning that they would all face troublesome times “before the white race regains its suspended supremacy.” Early in 1868, Mary Jones gave up the plantations, which had now become for her “the grave of my buried hopes and affections.”
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O
NLY A FEW YEARS
after the war, the sight of an old master gathering around him his former slaves, all of whom still maintained that same deference in his presence, filled a white observer in South Carolina with nostalgic memories. He had seen more than enough, he conceded, to know that such exhibitions of the old affections stood out “like an oasis in the desert.” On the eve of Radical Reconstruction, most planters and freedmen appeared to be dissatisfied in various degrees with the workings of the new labor system. While planters fretted over erratic work habits, freedmen complained of little inducement to work. Where it had only recently been popular to contemplate the rapid demise of the African race under freedom, the talk now turned increasingly to the demise of the plantation system, if only because the blacks refused to work as slaves, rebelled against white authority, and rejected any organization of labor that resembled the old times. “If a man got to go crost de riber, and he can’t git a boat, he take a log,” a freedman on James Island, South Carolina, declared after the planters had repossessed their lands. “If I can’t own de land, I’ll hire or lease land, but I won’t contract.”
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Even as the freedman returned to work for wages or shares, disillusionment with the meager rewards of his labor kept alive that persistent “mania for owning a small piece of land” and farming for himself. That is, he retained an aspiration he had seen many whites and even a few blacks realize. With the end of each agricultural season, the aspiration seemed to take on a new life. While trying to explain the unwillingness of blacks to contract in early 1866, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in South Carolina made a revealing observation, perhaps without fully appreciating its implications: “They appear to be willing to work, but are decisive in their expressions, to work for no one but themselves.” Only a week earlier, another Bureau officer noted the unanimity with which the laborers refused to contract unless they could control the crops they made. After considering the options open to them, the freedmen on Edisto Island, who were about to lose the lands they had been cultivating, declared that nothing could induce them to work again for their former masters under the old system. But if they could rent the lands they now worked, they were willing to remain. It was the only way to retain at least a semblance of the independence they were now being asked to surrender.
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The experiences of planters in various sections of the South testified to the determination of the freedman to “set up for himself.” After paying wages for three years and treating his hands “with the utmost kindness,” a planter in Maury County, Tennessee, seemed perplexed by their “growing dislike to being controlled by or working for white men. They prefer to get a little patch where they can do as they choose.” Before his laborers would agree to contract, a Louisiana planter reported, they insisted on
having tracts of land set off for their exclusive use. No sooner had she paid off her hands, Frances Leigh noted, than a number of them took their money and purchased small, inadequate lots out in the pine woods, “where the land was so poor they could not raise a peck of corn to the acre.” Although she thought they had been defrauded, she was still impressed by the obvious enthusiasm with which her former laborers cleared the lots, built their log cabins on it, and prepared to live “like gentlemen.” With similar amazement, she had previously witnessed the remarkable transformation that came over former slaves she thought “far too old and infirm to work for me” when they came into possession of any land. “Once let them get a bit of ground of their own given to them, and they became quite young and strong again.”
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The drift of these experiences, reflecting both old aspirations and recent disappointments, was unmistakable. Unable to acquire ownership of land, whether because he lacked the funds or local custom barred him, the black laborer increasingly resolved on an alternative that would provide him with the feeling if not the actual status of a family farmer. He became a sharecropper. In the usual arrangement, the planter divided his land into small units or “farms” and rented them to individual black families; he also furnished the necessary implements, work animals, and seed. In return, the tenant or “farmer” paid the planter one half of the crops he raised; if he supplied his own tools and animals, he generally paid one fourth to one third of his crops. In either case, he might have to pledge another portion of the prospective crops to the supply merchant (or the landowner serving in that capacity) for the food and clothing he purchased.
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After several years of highly precarious planting, the landowner was not necessarily averse to the rental system, preferring to reorganize the plantation rather than continue an increasingly unprofitable arrangement. At best, he hoped to achieve a modicum of economic success without compromising his ownership of the land and without having to suffer the ordeal of supervising black labor. Such a decision, nevertheless, was not always reached easily. Only when he despaired altogether of operating the place successfully along the old lines did the planter usually agree to divide and rent. That was the only way he could procure labor “under any terms,” an Alabama planter conceded, and still realize “a
bare support”
from his land. Despite the anguish that often accompanied such decisions, however, the plantation system itself remained very much intact. Only apportionment of land and responsibility on the plantation had been altered.
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But to many freedmen, the new arrangement—tenant farming—seemed promising at first glance because of the feelings of independence it imparted, making them in effect mock farmers and freeing them from the cultivation of staple crops and from working in field gangs under supervision. As if to underscore such feelings, the new tenant might move his cabin from the old slave village out onto the plot of land he had rented or else build a new cabin to symbolize his new autonomy. In opting for this arrangement, moreover, he fully expected to make this plot of land his own
through hard work and frugality—precisely as his leaders and many of his white friends from the North had advised him. But in most instances, such aspirations remained unfulfilled and the tenant found himself little better off than he had been under the previous arrangement. “We made crops on shares for three years after freedom, and then we commenced to rent,” Richard Crump recalled. “They didn’t pay everything they promised. They taken a lot of it away from us. They said figures didn’t lie. You know how that was. You dassent dispute a man’s word then.”
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No matter how often the black press celebrated the few examples of economic success and landownership, the great mass of laboring freedmen, whether they rented lands or worked for wages or shares, remained laborers—landless agricultural workers. Even the illusion of independence imparted by tenant farming could not obscure for very long the fact that the black “farmer” enjoyed neither ownership of the soil nor the full rewards of his labor. He worked the white man’s land, planted with the white man’s seeds, plowed with the white man’s plow and mules, and harvested a crop he owed largely to the white man for the land, the seeds, the plow, and the mules, as well as the clothes he wore and the food he consumed. And if his own leaders could offer him little more than the mid-nineteenth-century shibboleths of hard work, perseverance, frugality, and honesty, to whom could he turn? How could he be frugal if he had no money to save? Why should he be honest only to have the white man defraud him? Why should he work hard and persevere if the results of that labor left him even further removed from acquiring the land on which he toiled? “The negro’s first want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live,—yes, sir,
a chance to live
,” a prominent white Georgian declared in late 1865. “Why, he can’t even live without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no crops except the white man gives him a chance. He hasn’t any timber; he can’t get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd him into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet.… What sort of freedom is that?”
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If the freedman’s “mania” for renting or owning land came to symbolize his yearning for economic independence and personal freedom, the betrayal of those expectations confirmed the persistence of the old dependency. The former slave found that all too little had changed. By resorting to a sharecropping arrangement, he had hoped to achieve a significant degree of autonomy; instead, he found himself plunged ever deeper into dependency and debt, pledging his future crops to sustain himself during the current crop. In that brief flurry of excitement and anticipation at the moment of freedom, there had been all kinds of talk about land and “living independently” and being able to do what the white folks did. But the talk was now of survival, their principal hopes remained unfulfilled, and some freedmen were certain they had been hopelessly betrayed. “We thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks,” recalled Felix Haywood,
who had been a slave in Texas. “We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t and they didn’t have us to work for them anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”
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More than seventy years after emancipation, Thomas Hall, who had been born a slave in Orange County, North Carolina, could still shake with anger when he thought about the way his people had been freed. “Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He give us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food and clothing, and he held us through our necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery. Lincoln done but little for the negro race and from living standpoint nothing.” While relating a history of white betrayal, North and South, the bitterness overflowed and he finally turned it upon the white interviewer.