Authors: David Goldfield
That was a hope, but it masked many fears. Would the freedmen work without compulsion? Would the former slave become a master supported by federal bayonets? Would there be a race war? Would the Federals confiscate whites' land? Slavery had ended; but what would take its place? Armed black men parading in the streets of southern cities and former slaves coming and going as they pleased and addressing whites in a too-familiar wayâwere these portents of a greater revolution to come, or merely a passing phase? Southern society was predicated on white supremacy. Without it, redemption would be lost.
Blacks hoped, too. The months after the surrender saw a giddy excitement in black communities across the country as residents contemplated a new equality, an opportunity to reconstruct the nation on egalitarian grounds. A young black man attending a Fourth of July celebration in Washington, D.C., exulted, “We come to the National Capitalâour Capitalâwith new hopes, new prospects, new joys, in view of the future and past of the people.” In Little Rock, Arkansas, another young black man proclaimed, “God marked it out with his own finger;⦠here, where we have been degraded, will we be exaltedâAMERICANS IN AMERICA, ONE AND INDIVISIBLE.” Such declarations represented different hopes and a different faith from those of white southerners. Both claimed to know God's purpose, but only one would prevail.
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Freedmen took to the roads. These were not aimless wanderings to test their freedom but purposeful searches for children, husbands, wives, and relatives, hoping to reconstitute families. They chose their destinations based on rumor or memory or from the master's recollection. So these journeys of hope would not end in frustration, the freedmen placed advertisements in local papers, posted notices in churches, and asked Freedmen's Bureau officials for assistance. A bureau agent in South Carolina recalled, “They had a passion, not so much for wandering, as for getting together, and every mother's son among them seemed to be in search of his mother; every mother in search of her children.” In North Carolina, a northern journalist came upon a middle-aged freedman, tired and footsore, who told him he had walked nearly six hundred miles to find his wife and children, who were sold away four years earlier. One freedman sought his mother, whom he had not seen since 1846. He eventually learned that she had died three years earlier. Even as late as the 1880s, advertisements appeared in newspapers requesting the whereabouts of relatives long lost. Here is one:
Charlotte Brock wishes to hear from her son Alonzo; was taken from her about 1859, to Memphis, Tenn; lived there with a family named Morrison. Think he was in the army during the rebellion. Any information concerning him will be thankfully received by his aged mother.
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Many of the attempts at reunion were successful. By 1870, nearly 75 percent of blacks lived in two-parent households. Even when reunions occurred, they were sometimes bittersweet. Laura Spicer's husband had remarried, thinking she had died. After the war, when he discovered Laura was alive, he was both relieved and tormented. He wrote to her, “I would come and see you but I know you could not bear it. I want to see you and I don't want to see you. I love you just as well as I did the last day I saw you, and it will not do for you and I to meet. I am married, and my wife have two children.” They continued to correspond. In one letter, he requested, “Send me some of the children's hair in a separate paper with their names on the papers.” He concluded the letter crying out to her, “Oh, I can see you so plain, at any-time. The woman is not born that feels as near to me as you do.”
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Many freedmen went to cities, not only to find loved ones but also to find work. The plantation was the master's domain, the place of whips, chains, and work from sunup to sundown. The city belonged to no man, and a freedman could be his own master. He could find a place to live, negotiate for work, and join a church and a mutual aid society. Although the majority of blacks remained on the farm, many moved to town. Within a year or two, blacks comprised the majority of the population in Charleston, Petersburg, and Memphis. White residents sputtered with rage, “The streets are filled with them.⦠The shops are overflowing with them, squandering on themselves and each other what little money they have acquired in anything that strikes their fancy.” If black migrants could not find lodgings in town they erected their own communities on the outskirts, leading to more fears among whites that these instant neighborhoods would become dens of vice and dissipation. What grated on whites was freedom, that former slaves were making their own decisions on where and how to live.
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Close contact was a fact of urban life. In rural areas, blacks and whites could maintain their distance. This was more difficult in cities. Sidewalks and streets were crowded. Segregation was not yet the rule in places such as taverns, train stations, and parks. Indiscriminate mingling implied a rough equality. Some cities enacted laws requiring blacks to walk about with passes as in the days of slavery. A black man in Richmond complained, “All that is needed to restore Slavery in full is the auction-block as it used to be.” White employers resisted hiring blacks, and cities imposed heavy licensing fees on those who wanted to go into business for themselves. Whites took up many of the city jobs that blacks had held before the war, such as drayman, barman, or barber. Black women had better luck finding jobs as laundresses and domestics. Whites hired armed guards (often former slaves) to patrol their porches and protect them from potential black thieves, murderers, and rapists who were allegedly waiting to pounce.
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Some of these black urban migrants moved back to the farm, but not enough to satisfy whites. Within a year of the surrender, white southerners had regained control of many local and state governments. Among the first pieces of business were laws to restrict black movement. Vagrancy laws established lengthy sentences for being about without means of support. Statutes set fines on employers for hiring blacks without checking references or their previous employer. A great fear of the white South was that the loss of black labor would ruin any chance of economic recovery.
These were not the greatest debilities confronting rural blacks. John Trowbridge, the New England writer, explained why, despite bleak prospects, city blacks were reluctant to move back to the farm. Like most other northerners, he believed that working for wages on the farm was the best path to success for the freedmen. The rural South would prosper, and they along with it. Freedmen would save enough money to purchase a farm of their own someday. It was the story of upward mobility, of free labor's infinite possibilities for success, that had driven the American dream since the country's birth. Trowbridge encountered some blacks in straitened circumstances in Petersburg. He tried to persuade them to return to the countryside where there was work. “But they assured me that they could not [go back]; their very lives had been in danger; and they told me of several murders perpetrated upon freedmen by the whites in their neighborhoods, besides other atrocities.” Indeed, not much had changed on many plantations. A South Carolina planter admitted to the “uncommon amount of whipping it takes now to keep the plantation niggers in order.”
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Land ownership would solve many of these problems. What blacks wanted most after the war was independence from the white man. Not separation, but independence to pursue their work and fortune. Whitelaw Reid asked freedmen in rural South Carolina what they desired of freedom, and they said, “Gib us our own land and we take care ourselves; but widout land, de ole massas can hire us or starve us, as dey please.” The government donated millions of acres of land to the railroads and begged, cajoled, and forced Indians onto reservations, but drew back when it came to securing land for the newly freed slave. The Republican Congress passed another homestead law in 1866 that enabled a small number of freedmen to purchase marginal land in the South, but a comprehensive grant program never emerged. Northerners conceived of freedmen as laborers. If they possessed skills and intelligence, and worked hard, they could aspire to land ownership and become rural Horatio Algers. But they would have to earn it without government subsidy.
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Blacks who had accumulated some savings could, of course, purchase land from whites. The official Freedmen's Bureau line was: “The government owns no lands in this State. It therefore can give away none. Freedmen can obtain farms with the money which they have earned by their labor. Every one, therefore, shall work diligently, and carefully save his wages, till he may be able to buy land and possess his own home.” In practice, this was nearly impossible. Traveling in the Mississippi Valley immediately after the war, Whitelaw Reid commented, “The feeling against any ownership of the soil by the negroes is so strong, that the man who should sell small tracts to them would be in actual personal danger.” Even renting a parcel to blacks was deemed “unworthy of a good citizen.” In a cash-poor South, with very few banks (that would not lend to freedmen anyway), land ownership would be difficult. Land ownership implied independence and the ability to accumulate capital and make decisions, all of which undermined the racial assumptions of whites.
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The situation seemed much more promising before the war ended, when General William T. Sherman issued his famous Field Orders No. 15 in January 1865. The orders arose out of a conference between Sherman, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and a group of black ministers in Savannah. The parties agreed to divide abandoned and confiscated lands on the Sea Islands and a portion of the Low Country coast south of Charleston into forty-acre plots for each black family. Sherman also suggested that the army could loan mules to the freedmen, the likely basis of the phrase “forty acres and a mule” that became a rallying cry for freedmen across the South. Sherman claimed later that the land transfer was a temporary measure to alleviate the tremendous influx of blacks into his lines following his march through Georgia. The freedmen assumed otherwise. By May 1865, forty thousand freedmen had settled on four hundred thousand acres of “Sherman land.”
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In May 1865, however, President Johnson announced his Proclamation of Amnesty, pardoning most Confederates and remitting any confiscated land. The freedmen were disconsolate. Some armed themselves to prevent the whites from repossessing their farms, but such resistance was short-lived. When Radical Republicans attempted to revive Sherman's orders in February 1866, the House defeated it by a three-to-one margin. Even at the height of the Radical tide in Congress, few lawmakers supported a return of black owners to the Sea Islands. This reversal was heartbreaking for the freedmen. The slaves had remained loyal to the government; their masters had not. They had toiled on these lands without recompense. Many had served in the Union armies, fighting to save the government that now betrayed them.
But hope persisted. A school for black children opened in Marianna, Florida, early in 1866. Each day, the children passed a white school whose students hurled taunts and stones at the black youngsters. The stones would occasionally hit their targets and cause minor but painful injuries. One morning, the black children armed themselves with stones and walked past the white school in formation. Before then, they had walked to school in pairs or small groups. A half-dozen white boys materialized as usual and began to throw their missiles. Instead of running away, the black boys stood their ground. Seeing resistance, more white boys poured out of their school and charged the black children. The black students unleashed their fusillade and waded into the white attackers, who retreated quickly into the safety of their building. “There were many bruises on both sides,” one of the black youngsters recalled, “but it taught the white youngsters to leave the colored ones alone.”
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T. Thomas Fortune was a prominent editor of a black newspaper in New York City at the time he wrote about this incident. In the scheme of Reconstruction events, it did not amount to much. But for ten-year-old Thomas, born a slave in Marianna, it was a revelatory experience. He and his comrades had challenged whites successfully. They could now pursue their goal of getting an education. It also underscored the obstacles the freedmen confronted in their pursuit of the American dream. The eagerness with which black children (and adults) flooded schools was matched by the hostility of the white community that resented any advance toward equality by the former slaves.
Northern missionaries, many of them young middle-class women from New England, came south to teach those whose liberation they had prayed for. Between 1862 and 1870, more than eight thousand northerners traveled to the South to teach former slaves. Their sponsoring organizations, such as the American Missionary Association or evangelical church groups, provided funds to purchase books, pay teachers, and establish schools. The AMA also founded several major black universities during the 1860s, including Hampton Institute in Virginia, Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Fisk University in Tennessee. These institutions would train a cadre of black teachers who eventually replaced white missionaries. The Methodist Church not only sent missionary teachers south; its northern members contributed $2 million to black education in the South between 1865 and 1880. Not all funding came from charity. Black communities in cities across the South donated hard-earned savings to secure better school buildings, books, and higher salaries for teachers. Even the students chipped in. A group of black youngsters in Chattanooga scoured the battlefield for bullets to sell and spent the proceeds on spelling books.
The Freedmen's Bureau coordinated the educational activities of the various church groups. By 1869, the Bureau oversaw three thousand schools serving 150,000 black pupils. In many parts of the South, the black freedom schools were the first public schools of any kind. In a meritocratic society, education is the great leveler. Being born a slave was not a permanent bar on aspiration. In order to achieve independence and financial security, however, education, as much as work, was essential. Even former slaves from the most isolated districts of the South understood the value of an education.