Read Been in the Storm So Long Online
Authors: Leon F. Litwack
The crucial difference could not be measured by the amount of compensation they now received but involved a different perception of themselves and their relationship to whites. The freedmen on the Sneed plantation, near Austin, Texas, expressed no desire to leave the place on which they had labored as slaves but they had every intention of moving out of their slave quarters. On the plantation of Joseph Glover in South Carolina, a slave named Abraham had served with considerable distinction during the
war, managing the place in his master’s absence and even berating “the bad behaviour of some of the people.” With the advent of freedom, Abraham informed his former master that he neither wished nor intended to leave but would await his return “to hear what proposal you may make.” No less ready to assert her new status was a black woman named Rose, who worked as a servant on a plantation in Louisiana and also performed the duties of midwife, attending both the slaves and several “white ladies” in the neighborhood. For assisting the white women, she had been paid ten dollars each time, half of which her mistress had retained. With freedom, her new employer promised her the entire ten dollars. “Didn’t you say the black people are free?” she asked him. When he agreed, she inquired, “White people are free, too, ain’t they?” When he again replied in the affirmative, Rose both asked and demanded, “Then why shouldn’t you pay me ten dollars every time I ’tend upon
the black folks
on the plantation?” None of these instances constituted startling or even dramatic manifestations of independence, any more than the action of some Alabama slaves who chose to stay with “massa” but demanded and secured the right to celebrate each year the anniversary of their freedom. (“Every 19th of June he would let us clean off a place and fix a platform and have dancing and eating out there in the field.”) But in each case, if only symbolically, the freedmen had made their point; they had acted on their freedom, they had asserted their individual worth, and they had no doubt derived considerable personal satisfaction and pride from doing so.
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To remain on the same farm or plantation, to work for the old master or for any white man, was not necessarily to forfeit, postpone, or compromise their freedom. No matter how each ex-slave chose to express this fact, many of them insisted that it be understood and acknowledged, even at the cost of severing the relationship altogether. “Whose servant are you?” the Reverend John Hamilton Cornish, an Episcopalian minister in Aiken, South Carolina, demanded to know of his former slave after reprimanding her for using profane language in his presence. “My own servant,” she replied. Seeking clarification, he asked her if she intended to remain with him. “I am willing to live with you as I have always done, & know you will pay me proper wages,” she replied. Not satisfied with that answer, the minister insisted, “If you remain with me, you will be my servant, & conduct yourself accordingly, & will receive just what you have been accustomed to receive. Nothing more.” If this had been calculated to impress her with his undiminished authority, the result must have been discouraging. “I’ll leave then,” she promptly announced. Having stood enough of her “impertinence,” the clergyman told her to “seek a better place” and to have her belongings removed by the end of the week. And still to his surprise, she did precisely that.
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Whether in the fields or in the house, the most disturbing manifestations of black freedom were the breakdown of the old discipline, the refusal to obey orders promptly if at all, and the disinclination to regard “massa”
and “missus” with the same degree of fear, awe, and respect previously expected of black subordinates. “My niggers used to do as I told them, but that time is passed,” a Louisiana planter lamented. The number of black laborers dismissed for “bad work & insolent language” may have been limited only by the difficulty in replacing them. Neither the formerly free Negroes nor the freed slaves, a northern observer wrote, “seem to recognize any obligations they may be under to employers.” Not only had they “appropriated” chickens, eggs, milk, and vegetables “to an amount fully equal to their wages” but any attempt to discipline them proved futile as long as some neighboring planter was anxious to hire them. Where slaves had behaved “outrageously” during the war, as on the Louisiana plantation of Governor Thomas O. Moore, the efforts of local whites to restore the old discipline met with only partial success. The conduct of black workers on the Moore place had become so
“disobedient
, defiant, [and] disrespectful” that the manager preferred to deal with them through an agent. “I go but seldom where they are at work,” he confessed.
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Comparisons of productivity under slave and free labor, a favorite pastime of postwar commentators of all persuasions, clearly favored the old system. With near unanimity, the planters themselves testified in the aftermath of the war that their former slaves did “half their former work”; the estimates ran both higher and lower but that average tended to prevail.
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A Mississippi planter told of a slave who had once picked thirty bales of cotton in one season but freedom reduced that figure to three bales; on the other hand, he praised three black families (also his former slaves) “who from nothing, are worth from $1,000 to $1,500 in money, stock, etc., to-day. They yielded to my advice. This number, out of 225 (which I was relieved of without any effort on my part); the balance are all trash, paupers, consumers, worse than army worms, and strange to say, they are quite as intelligent as the prosperous ones; but generally good slaves made poor freedmen.”
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To place any considerable weight on these initial assessments of the productivity of freedmen would be to minimize the ways in which a destructive war might have disrupted any kind of labor system. The statistics of output, moreover, could tell different stories, depending on who collected them and for what purpose. Abolitionists and Union officials eager to prove the advantages of free labor were not necessarily more accurate in their computations than those who looked back with nostalgia to the old days and the Lost Cause. No doubt productivity declined under freedom, but to many of the ex-slaves comparative labor efficiency seemed less important in 1865 than the conditions under which they would work as free men and women and the rewards they would reap from their labor.
With the scarcity of laborers in many sections of the postwar South, the former slaves appeared to be in an excellent bargaining position. “The cry on all sides, is for laborers,” a much-perplexed Mississippi planter observed, and yet the freedman, “finding himself master of the situation,”
preferred to use his new power to reduce his labor rather than increase his compensation. The problem, most observers agreed, lay not so much in the number of working hours (the ten-hour day, six-day week still prevailed) as in the inclination of the freedmen to labor less arduously. Even as patient and systematic a planter as Edward B. Heyward, who prided himself on his unique understanding of the rice-field blacks, almost despaired of extracting more labor from them.
The work progresses very slowly and they seem perfectly indifferent. Oh! no one away from “the scene of operations” can have any conception of the difficulties we have to encounter.… I allude especially to our Rice field negro, a real gang worker, a perfect machine or part of a machine rather. He never thinks, never did, perhaps never will. The women appear most lazy, merely because they are allowed the opportunity. They wish to stay in the house or in the garden all the time.… The men are scarcely much better. They go out, because they are obliged to. They feel bound as a slave and work under constraint, are impudent, careless and altogether very provoking.
What most planters suspected and many freedmen readily conceded was a general and deliberate slowdown—the development of a work pace consistent with and reflective of their new status as free men and women. “Their idea of freedom,” a Federal official reported from Bolivar County, Mississippi, in July 1865, “is that they are under no control; can work when they please, and go where they wish.”
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With careful training, and with force if necessary, the planter class thought it could instill a discipline and attitude in their slaves that would overcome the blacks’ traditional notions about work and time. But to listen to the former masters in the aftermath of the war, that discipline came unhinged the moment their blacks began to act on their freedom. “Negroes know nothing of the value of time,” a Texas planter proclaimed, and on countless farms and plantations that seemed to translate into less work and lost days, with laborers reporting to the fields late, remaining out longer at mealtime, and refusing to labor on Saturday afternoons.
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Pierce Butler, the large Georgia rice planter, wondered how he could possibly make a crop when most of his hands left the fields in the early afternoon, even at the busiest time of the season. When his daughter returned to the plantation after the war to assist him, she shared his exasperation, particularly in view of the loyalty the blacks had shown him as slaves.
The negroes talked a great deal about their desire and intention to work for us, but their idea of work, unaided by the stern law of necessity, is very vague, some of them working only half a day and some even less. I don’t think one does a really honest full day’s work, and so of course not half the necessary amount is done and I am afraid never will be again.… I generally found that if I wanted a thing done I first had to tell the negroes to do it, then show them how, and finally do it myself.
Their way of managing not to do it was very ingenious, for they always were perfectly good-tempered, and received my orders with, “Dat’s so, missus; just as missus says,” and then always somehow or other left the thing undone.
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Few planters appeared to comprehend fully why this was happening, only that their experiences confirmed what they had long suspected—that black slaves were productive laborers while free blacks were not. After thirty-seven years devoted to raising sugarcane and cotton, a Louisiana planter found himself unable to induce his seventy-five blacks, almost all of them his former slaves, to produce even a fraction of the prewar crops. Not only did they work slowly but they took no interest in maintaining the plantation fences (“all rotting down”) or buildings (“decaying and going to ruin”). It was as though they no longer cared. “Wherever you look the eye rests on nothing but the relics of former things fast passing to destruction.” Neither “moral suasion” nor wage incentives had induced them to work harder. “The nature of the negro cannot be changed by the offer of more or less money,” he concluded, repeating the familiar excuse of employers everywhere, “all he [the Negro] desires is to eat, drink and sleep, and perform the least possible amount of labor.” But even if the ultimate responsibility lay with racial characteristics, that made the experience no less wrenching, the humiliations endured no less trying. “I have the heartbreak over things,” one disillusioned planter wrote. “I see this big plantation, once so beautifully kept up, going to rack and ruin. I see the negroes I trained so carefully deteriorating every day. We suffer from theft, are humiliated by impertinence; and cannot help ourselves.… This is the first rule in their lesson of freedom—to get all they can out of white folks and give as little as possible in return.”
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Where planters, overseers, and managers failed to induce the blacks to maintain the old pace of labor, the black drivers fared little better, provided they were tolerated at all. On a Louisiana sugar plantation, Jim had long held the position of driver, and he was proud of the way he had exercised his duties—no prouder than his master, who thought him the most intelligent and skillful slave he had ever known. After the war, however, Jim found his people unresponsive to his demands, and he could only shake his head in disbelief:
I sposed, now we’s all free, dey’d jump into de work keen, to make all de money dey could. But it was juss no work at all. I got so ‘scouraged sometimes I’s ready to gib it all up, and tell ’em to starve if dey wanted to. Why, sah, after I’d ring de bell in the mornin’ ’twould be hour, or hour ’n half ’fore a man ’d get into de fiel’. Den dey’d work along maybe an hour, maybe half hour more; and den dey’d say, “Jim, aint it time to quit?” I say, “No, you lazy dog, taint ten o’clock.” Den dey’d say, “Jim, I’s mighty tired,” and next thing I’d know, dey’d be pokin’ off to de quarters. When I scold and swear at ’em, dey say, “We’s free now, and
we’s not work unless we pleases.” Sah, I got so sick of deir wuflessness dat I sometimes almost wished it was old slavery times again.
That was the driver’s view of how matters stood; the remaining field hands, however, thought him a hard taskmaster—“harder on them than white folks.” Few of them, moreover, expected to contract for a new year unless they were accorded certain privileges, like their own tracts of land to cultivate for their own benefit. Nevertheless, the driver expected that in time these freedmen would come to their senses, particularly with a white overseer now on the premises. “Dey wants a white man to gib orders,” he explained. “Dey wouldn’t min’ me las’ yeah, ’cause I’s nigger like demselves. I tink dey do better dis yeah.”
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Although the rate of “desertion” appears to have been lower in the fields than in the households, few planters could assume in mid-1865 that any of their hands would be on the same plantation at the end of the year. Within a period of five months, the Beaver Bend plantation, a once flourishing enterprise, was brought to a point of virtual ruin. Before the war, Hugh Davis had reaped substantial profits out of his 5,000 acres of rich Black Belt land; in 1862, he died of an apoplectic stroke, and an administrator and overseer managed the plantation while Hugh Davis, Jr., eighteen years old when the war broke out, served in the Confederate Army. After the war, Davis found that the slaves in this region had “all become monomaniacs on the subject of freedom,” thousands of them flocking to Selma “to be free” and “to embrace the
nigger lovers
,” only to discover Yankee freedom to be a “delusion” and to hasten back to the old plantation. Of the seventy-eight Davis slaves, some thirteen men and thirteen women were persuaded to remain and contract to work “as they have heretofore done” for provisions and a share (one fifth) of the crop. Within several weeks after Davis’ return to the plantation, continual movement and malingering among the former slaves seriously interfered with the completion of the crop. “Negroes will not work for pay, the
lash
is all I fear that will make them,” he wrote on May 30, 1865. Five weeks later, the same problems plagued him, with seventeen of his “best hands” having left for Selma. The Davis plantation, like so many others, experienced a turbulent period in which freedmen—both the old hands and the newly hired workers—came and departed with an exasperating regularity. After sustaining still further losses, the young planter finally threw up his hands in disgust and left the plantation to take up residence in nearby Marion, where he remained the rest of his life. On October 3, 1865, some five months after his return from military service, Davis made his final journal entry as a prospective postwar planter: “Farewell Old Farm Book! to record the future work of free negroes beside your content would disgrace the past. The work and profits of the best labor system ever established have been written on these pages—the past was brilliant but the future is dismal, gloomy.”
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