Been in the Storm So Long (85 page)

To judge the freedmen by their actions, on St. Helena Island and elsewhere in the South, Martin Delany had articulated feelings that were only beginning to surface in the negotiations over the terms of free labor. Neither Delany nor the host of Bureau officers and missionaries who had descended upon the South were in any real position to do for the freedman what he would have to do for himself—that is, work out some kind of arrangement with the former masters that would be commensurate with his new legal status and his aspirations. Even with the presence of Federal
authorities, whose attitudes varied enormously, the ultimate settlement—barring any redistribution of land—would have to be made between those who worked and those who owned the land and the tools. And, as a black newspaper in Georgia observed,
“no
man loves work naturally. Interest or necessity induces him to labor. If the laborer has no inducement to be faithful, he should not be censured for neglect.… Why does the
white man
labor? That he may acquire property and the means of purchasing the comforts and luxuries of life. The
colored man
will labor for the same reason.”
⁶

Actually, despite the gloomy talk and predictions, there was never really any question about whether the freedmen would work. Unlike many of their former masters, they had never known anything but work, and most of them did not view this as a question at all. From the moment of their emancipation, the bulk of the ex-slave population had little choice but to labor for old and new employers under a variety of arrangements. Some of the very planters who forecast the Negro’s doom were successfully using free black labor; indeed, a Virginia planter seemed stunned and almost indignant that his blacks were working with a diligence they had denied him when they were his slaves. The son of a former slaveholder on the Sea Islands made the same observation when he returned in 1863 and began to cultivate the plantation with the newly freed blacks. The acknowledgment of their freedom and the promise of compensation appeared to be sufficient inducement.

Although obviously searching for evidence of black industry, sympathetic northern observers did not have to fabricate their reports. The evidence was all around them, not only in the fields but in the towns and cities, where blacks were most prominently employed in the reconstruction of a war-ravaged South. Watching the rebuilding of the burned-out district of Richmond, a traveler came away impressed with the fact that black men comprised a majority of the workers. “They drove the teams, made the mortar, carried the hods, excavated the old cellars or dug new ones, and, sitting down amid the ruins, broke the mortar from the old bricks and put them up in neat piles ready for use. There were also colored masons and carpenters employed on the new buildings.” And yet, he reflected, despite such scenes, “I was once more informed by a cynical citizen that the negro, now that he was free, would rob, steal, or starve, before he would work.”
⁸

If the Negro existed only to make cotton, sugar, and rice, as so many whites professed to believe, that would have sentenced to immediate oblivion thousands of skilled black workers and artisans, as well as the far larger number of menial laborers who performed the arduous tasks shunned by white people. In the skilled trades, the principal questions revolved not around the black man’s willingness to work or his ability but how much longer he would be permitted to compete with white artisans and mechanics and the degree to which his compensation permitted him to support himself. “By de time I pays ten dollars a month rent fo’ my house, an’ fifteen cents a poun’ for beef or fresh po’k, or thirty cents fo’ bacon, an’ den buys my clo’es, I doesn’t hab much leff,” a hod carrier in Selma, Alabama, declared. “I’s done tried it, an’ I knows brack man cant stan’ dat.” Nor did black workers in a Richmond tobacco factory, engaged in labor that white men rejected as too difficult, fare much better.

That constant advice to work or starve, which their white “friends” so freely imparted, never seemed to anticipate the plight of people who did little more than work and yet stood on the brink of starvation. “I keeps on washin for em,” remarked a laundress in Richmond, who spent most of her day stooped over a washtub, “for if I leave em they’ll never pay me what they owe me.”
⁹

On the plantations and farms, where the bulk of black laborers still resided, the issue was not whether the freedmen would work but rather for whom, at what rates, and under what conditions, and those were different questions altogether, requiring answers from a class of Southerners who had little experience in dealing with such matters. “Can a planter be expected to treat the laborers under his control in any other way to-day than he has treated them for the last twenty years?” the
New Orleans Tribune
asked. “He and they are the same men, in the same place, bearing to each other, in all respects, the same apparent relations. No visible change has passed off between them. The Proclamation of Emancipation did not invest the slave with a physical sign of freedom. It was a metaphysical endowment.”
¹⁰
But if the relationship between “master” and laborer remained essentially unaltered by emancipation, so did the mutual dependency upon which it had always rested, and that raised the most crucial question of all. Could the former slave transform the white man’s dependence on him into a formidable weapon with which to expand his personal autonomy, improve his day-to-day life and his prospects for the
future, and thereby redefine if not sever altogether the old relationship? Whatever the degree of success attained toward these ends, the effort itself marked a significant break with the past.

W
HEN
W
ILLIAM
E
LLIOTT
tried to persuade Jacob to work for him, he ran into unexpected difficulties. As his slave, Jacob had served him faithfully over many years, and Elliott, a South Carolina planter, wished not only to retain a valuable laborer but to have him use his influence to convince the other blacks to return to work. Before he would agree to terms, however, Jacob demanded certain concessions—like the right to keep the provisions he made for himself—that would have lessened his dependency on the old master. He asked for them, moreover, in consideration of his previous record of service to the family. To Elliott, that might have suggested a demand for retroactive compensation, and he viewed the question quite differently than his former slave. “I told him I thought the obligation lay the other way. He is eaten up with self-esteem & selfishness.”
¹¹

If the incident be judged by the content of the postwar debate, William Elliott clearly had the advantage. Although dispossessed slaveholders thought themselves entitled to compensation for their losses (President Lincoln had once proposed it as a way to encourage voluntary emancipation), the question of remunerating the slaves for past labor never reached the level of serious consideration. But if the freedmen were not to be paid for their work as slaves, and few of them ever pressed the matter, they could be quite adamant about being paid for any future labor. As slaves, each of them had borne a price tag; as free men and women, they now felt entitled to wages or crop shares commensurate with the labor they performed. To settle for anything less was to compromise their freedom.

During the Civil War, often at the first sighting of Yankee troops, slaves refused to work without some form of compensation. What a Louisiana overseer described in 1863 as “a state of mutiny” on a neighboring plantation proved to be the failure of the blacks to report to the fields one morning; instead, they appeared before the overseer and insisted they would no longer work without pay. At the same time, the workers on a South Carolina plantation turned down the wage offer of their master. “I mean to own my own manhood,” one of them explained, “and I’m goin’ on to my own land, just as soon as when I git dis crop in, an’ I don’t desire for to make any change until den.” Besides, he added, “I’m not goin’ to work for any man for any such price [25 cents a day].” That was how the others felt, too, as a fellow laborer quickly indicated: “I won’t work for no Man for 25 cents a day—not dis chile—unless he gib me my rations too!”
¹²

Even while their legal status remained clouded, newly freed slaves articulated their dissatisfaction with the past by conditioning any future
labor on the fulfillment of certain immediate demands, such as payment in good wages (not in worthless Confederate bills), adequate food and clothing, additional time off for meals and holidays, and the abolition of gang labor and the position of overseer. If the employer expected his free laborers to demonstrate that habitual deference and compliance, he might find himself deeply disappointed if not at times outraged. Early in 1864, for example, a planter in Louisiana addressed a group of prospective field hands in the hope of hiring them. “All listened attentively,” noted a reporter present at the scene, “and there was no stupidity apparent in their faces. They seemed to hear every adjective.” After listening to the explanation of terms, the laborers countered with questions which revealed their most immediate concerns: “When will our wages be paid?” “What clothing are we to have?” “What land are we allowed?” “Can we keep our pigs?” The women insisted they would no longer work on Saturdays; the men indicated their unwillingness to perform any plantation chores on Sunday. Finally, the planter asked them to raise their hands if they agreed to the terms. At first, a number of them, including most of the women, refused to do so, holding out for a five-day week, but they finally assented on condition they could work less than the full time.
¹³

The initial give-and-take between planters and laborers in wartime Louisiana impressed a northern observer for the ways in which the blacks were rapidly learning their own power and worth. “They have a mine of strategy,” he reported, “to which the planter sooner or later yields.” He cited the example of a planter who had hired a new overseer; the choice proved to be obnoxious to the blacks because of his reputation for wielding the whip and using abusive language in addressing black women. When a delegation of field hands demanded the overseer’s dismissal, the planter refused in the strongest possible language. After vowing that he would hire anyone he chose to be overseer, he ordered the hands back to work. Rather than return to the fields, however, the blacks went to their cabins, packed up their belongings, and started down the road; they had not gone far before the owner called them back and promised them a voice in the selection of a new overseer.
¹⁴

If the South wanted some indication of what it might expect from the new labor relations, there was also that unique experiment on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, where the freed slaves and a select group of largely northern employers tried to make a success out of cotton cultivation by free black labor. Not long after the Federal occupation, and still quite early in the war, a Sea Islands black made clear the prevailing sentiment about returning to work: “I craves work, ma’am, if I gets a little pay, but if we don’t gets pay, we don’t care—don’t care to work.” But even when compensated for their labor, some of the blacks thought the pay to be inadequate, particularly in comparison to the profits reaped by their new employers. And when they resolved to make their feelings known, the laborers did so with sufficient force and unanimity to alarm those high-minded missionaries who thought themselves the best friends and emancipators
of this oppressed race. Early in 1864, Harriet Ware recorded the “injudicious” way in which a group of these “poor, ignorant creatures” confronted Edward Philbrick, a Boston entrepreneur and a firm believer in free labor who had obtained extensive acreage on St. Helena Island.