Read Been in the Storm So Long Online
Authors: Leon F. Litwack
Before Philbrick left the islands, he leased out his plantation and tried to induce the blacks to contract with the new superintendent; instead, the two men found themselves surrounded by disaffected field hands who were shouting, “A dollar a task! A dollar a task!”—substantially more than they had been earning. When Philbrick explained to them how the proceeds of last year’s crop had been spent in carrying on the current work, they refused to believe him; one of the blacks, in fact, insisted that “they [the employers] had been jamming the bills into that big iron cage [Philbrick’s safe] for six months, and there must be enough in it now to bust it!” Still refusing to budge, Philbrick opened his door several days later only to confront a delegation of twenty women. Once again, “old Grace” spoke for the group:
I’se come to you, sir. [pause] I’se been working fer owner three years, and made with my chillun two bales cotton last year, two more this year. I’se a flat-footed pusson and don’t know much, but I knows those two bales cotton fetch ’nough money, and I don’t see what I’se got for ’em. When I take my leetle bit money and go to store, buy cloth, find it so dear, dear Jesus!—the money all gone and leave chillun naked. Some people go out yonder and plant cotton for theyself. Now they get big pile of money for they cotton, and leave we people ’way back. That’s what I’se lookin’ on, Marsa. Then when I come here for buy ’lasses, when Massa Charlie sell he sell good ’lasses, then when Mister W. sell he stick
water
in ’em,
water enough
. Molasses turn thin, but he charge big price for ’em. Now I’se done working for such ’greement. I’se done, sir.
But Philbrick remained unmoved, rejected the demands for higher pay, restated his terms, and told those who found them unacceptable that they were free to go elsewhere. “I told them, too, that if some of those people who made so much noise didn’t look out, they would get turned off the place, just as Venus and her gang got turned off last year.” Before long some of the women returned to inform him of their decision to remain and accede to his terms. “The fact is,” Philbrick confided to a friend, “they are trying to play brag, as such people often will; but they will all go to work in a few days, I feel sure.”
15
Whether expressed collectively or individually, the threat by former
slaves to make their continued labor contingent on a white employer complying with their demands was in itself almost unprecedented. The implications of such bargaining were certainly not lost on the native whites, some of whom chose to expel blacks who refused to work “as usual” or who deigned to approach them about an agreement. No sooner had Richmond fallen than the slaves in one household selected a committee of three to inform their owner that they expected wages for any future services. Infuriated at this display of insolence, he ordered them from the room. “Well I told the whole crew to go to hell, and they left,” he later explained; “its my opinion they’ll all get there soon enough.” Still recouping from the shock of emancipation, some employers were in no mood to offer their newly freed slaves anything more than the usual quarters, provisions, and clothing, and scores of freedmen did agree to such terms during and immediately after the war, at least until the current crop had been completed. But that arrangement failed to satisfy Ann Ulrich, who told her master “dat since freedom we git a little change”; he responded with a torrent of “all de low names he could think of” and ordered her off the plantation. Nor was Mary Love satisfied with the new dress her mistress had given her, along with the promise to feed and house her. “After while I asked her ain’t she got some money for me, and she say no, ain’t she giving me a good home? Den I starts to feeling like I ain’t treated right.” Some days later, without saying “nothing to nobody,” she placed the new dress in a bundle and headed for the nearest town. “Its ten miles into Bonham, and I gits in town about daylight. I keeps on being afraid, ’cause I can’t git it out’n my mind I still belong to Mistress.”
16
Community pressures—both white and black—often inhibited any early agreement on paid labor. While the status of slavery and the possibility of compensation remained unclear, many planters held back, preferring to dismiss recalcitrant slaves rather than bargain with them. When blacks in Fredericksburg, Virginia, defected in large numbers and demanded wages, white residents responded by agreeing among themselves not to hire their own or other people’s slaves. After one resident broke that pact and agreed to hire his servants, “the gentlemen of the town” warned him that he was establishing a dangerous precedent and violating the laws of Virginia, and that his action would mark him as a traitor to the state. “So the old man refused to hire them,” a neighbor wrote, “and they all left him.” Such understandings among whites were a forerunner of postwar agreements not to tamper with each other’s former slaves and to set maximum wage and share rates. But the pressures could work both ways. That is, blacks who continued to work when others refused to do so were apt to encounter the hostility of their own people. Thus did a South Carolina proprietress observe “the faithful few” among her slaves to be “uneasy,” fearing repercussions from those who had left. “Rius gave his wife (Ellen) a fearful beating because she came to wait on Aunt Nenna. Those who are faithful suffer so much from the rebellious ones, and we can do nothing to protect them.”
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Confronted with the departure of their laborers, growing numbers of planters would have to face up ultimately to the necessity of reaching some kind of agreement with them. Late in the war, Henry W. Ravenel, the introspective South Carolina slaveholder, acknowledged the need to effect “a radical change” in the labor system. The reason for his decision was clear enough: “Since Thursday the negroes have not been at work.… The negroes are on a ‘strike’ for terms & until an agreement can be made, matters will be no better.” His blacks objected to “gang work,” they wanted no overseer or driver, and they demanded a plot of land “to work for their own use.” Although anxious to retain their labor, Ravenel, for all his brave talk about “a radical change,” feared any concessions which would be “incompatible with discipline & good management.” While the impasse continued, he detected a “sullenness” in his laborers “which I dislike to see,” and he heard that many blacks in the neighborhood, including presumably some of his own, were now armed. The house servants belonging to a Georgia woman determined to test their freedom by suing her for wages. “A most unwarrantable procedure,” her son-in-law wrote afterwards, but he agreed that henceforth “we must pay for services rendered.”
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With the acknowledgment of emancipation, most planters gradually resigned themselves to some form of compensated labor. When the master assembled his newly freed slaves to inform them of his offer, he might also use the occasion to remind them of their new responsibilities and to introduce them to some of the harsher realities of free labor. Thus did a planter in Lowndes County, Alabama, explain to his blacks the new situation in which they now found themselves:
Formerly, you were my slaves; you worked for me, and I provided for you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If you were sick, I had the doctor come to you. When you needed clothes, clothes were forthcoming; and you never went hungry for lack of meal and pork. You had little more responsibility than my mules.
But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the responsibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did, now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped, and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly and lazy, your wages will be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will be prosperous and respected and happy.
If only every planter adopted this approach, he assured a northern visitor, there would be a harmonious transition to free labor. “They all understood this talk,” he added, “and liked it, and went to work like men on the strength of it.… There’s everything in knowing how to manage them.”
19
The transition to free labor would seldom be as smooth as this Alabama planter envisioned. Not only was the situation without any clear precedent but the sharp divisions of race and class, exacerbated by the heritage of slavery and wartime memories, were bound to complicate the new relationship of white employer and black laborer. “I do not like the negro as well free as I did as a slave,” a Virginian conceded, “for the reason that there is now between us an antagonism of interest to some extent, while, before, his interest and mine were identical. Then, I was always thinking of how I could fix him comfortably. Now, I find myself driving a hard bargain with him for wages; and I find that sort of feeling suggested directly by motives of interest coming in between the employer and the employed.” When the former master came around to compensated labor, he would have to calculate precisely how much his ex-slaves were worth to him as free workers. That created some obvious conflicts, with employers and laborers entertaining different notions of value and both determined to stand by their estimates. “They have what seem to me to be extravagant ideas as to what they ought to receive,” a North Carolinian observed, and scores of planters would register the same complaint. But surely, some freedmen suggested, they should not be worth any less now than the price for which their masters had occasionally hired them out as slaves. If the planter pleaded financial difficulties, as so many did, the freedmen had only to look out into the fields and calculate the value of the expected crops. “Massa fust said he find all de famly food and house for our work,” a Virginia black remarked; “den I think that, as him grow 4,000 bushels corn, near 10,000 lbs. clover, and odder tings ’sides, he can ’ford to pay me better dan dat, so I no go with him. Me tell him me worth more, and p’raps he give me some of crop.”
20
Accustomed to holding the upper hand in all dealings with blacks, the former slaveholder preferred to make his own decision about compensation rather than suffer the audaciousness of freedmen who confronted him with demands or ultimatums. In his region, a Florida farmer and physician revealed, the planters usually refused to pay “any who demand it” but several had promised to supply their freedmen with provisions at the end of the year if they worked faithfully. Even relationships of long standing, which had survived the war and the first years of emancipation, could fall apart when the ex-slave raised the question of additional pay. Within that tightly knit Jones clan of Georgia, for example, Kate had remained “faithful” to Mary Jones’s daughter while many others defected. Not until late in 1867 did she assert herself on the wage question: “I wish to tell you if you will give me twelve dollars per month [an increase of three dollars] I will stay with you; but if not, I have had good offers and I will find another place.” Despite the years of loyal, unpaid labor this servant had rendered, the mistress of the household turned down her request for a raise. When Kate then left her, the mistress noted that she did so “with a very impertinent air.”
21
The sheer novelty of free black labor introduced complexities and nuances into the issues that traditionally separated employers and workers.
The proposed compensation mattered less to some freedmen than what form it would take (crop shares or cash), when it would be paid (monthly or after completion of the crop), and the often arbitrary nature of the employer’s deductions (for the provisions he supplied and the fines he levied for negligent work). Of equally vital concern to the freedman might be the kinds of crops he could now grow (the old staples or food), the quality of the provisions he received, the availability of schools for his children, the right to unrestricted travel, and freedom from verbal and physical abuse. Inseparable from all these considerations, and for many the most crucial, was the degree of personal autonomy he could now enjoy.
22
The only way to keep the ex-slaves on the plantations without compromising their freedom, the
New Orleans Tribune
boldly suggested, was not simply to compensate them but to make them full partners in the management and in the crop yields; freedom implied the abolition of both “slaves” and “masters,” the “democratization” of the plantations, and the opportunity for blacks to control their own crops, lands, and lives. Unless “the necessary step” was taken to free the workingman, the newspaper concluded, emancipation would remain “a mockery and a sham.” By “the necessary step,” the editor envisioned the free colored community of New Orleans investing their money in land and managing that land in partnership with the former slaves, who would perform the labor.
23
Early in the postwar period, at least, that ultimate question of who controlled the crops and the lands remained unresolved in the minds of many freedmen. After noting that planters now intended to pay their ex-slaves with crop shares, Henry M. Turner, the outspoken black clergyman, refused to applaud their action; instead, he dismissed the proposal as an “ingenious trickery … designed to keep the old master fat doing nothing, making the Yankees believe ‘dis old nigga no wants to leave massa,’ and for the purpose of fizzling them out of all their claims upon the real estate.” Rather than settle for compensation in wages or shares, the freedmen in some areas were already insisting that the crops they had planted in 1865, if not the land itself, rightfully belonged to them. “Some of them,” wrote the police chief in Duplin County, North Carolina, “are declaring they intend to have lands, even if they shed blood to obtain them. Some of them are demanding all of the crop they have raised on the former master’s lands, and in some cases, so obstinate are they in these demands, that I have had to arrest them before they would come to terms.”
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