Been in the Storm So Long (87 page)

With emancipation, many former slaves obviously sensed a new power and evinced a determination to test it. The mere offer of compensation would not assure the employers of a stable and contented labor force. To pay them for their labor, after all, did not resolve all fundamental questions about authority, autonomy, and control of the land. Whether provoked by a wage dispute or some other grievance, freedmen continued to leave the old places, sometimes en masse. Still more remained and worked indifferently, reserving any enthusiasm they might have for their own individual garden plots. Looking at those small gardens, which they had
tended and cherished as slaves, many freedmen had heard enough to imagine them expanded into forty-acre farms. That remained the most exciting prospect of all, exceeding in importance and in emotional investment any question of wages.

Shortly after the fall of Richmond, the scene acted out on the nearby Rosewood plantation posed the problem a number of landowners would have to face soon enough. After having promised to remain and work, a freedman named Cyrus absented himself from the fields. When Emma Mordecai, the plantation mistress, questioned him about his conduct, he replied by advancing his own perception of how matters stood between them.

E
VEN AS THEY TOILED
in the same fields, performed the familiar tasks, and returned at dusk to the same cabins, scores of freedmen refused to resign themselves to the permanent status of a landless agricultural working-class. Like most Americans, they aspired to something better and yearned for economic independence and self-employment. Without that independence, their freedom seemed incomplete, even precarious. “Every colored man will be a slave, & feel himself a slave,” a black soldier insisted, “until he can raise him own bale of cotton & put him own mark upon it & say dis is mine!” Although often expressed vaguely, as if to talk about it openly might be unwise, the expectation many ex-slaves shared in the aftermath of the war was that “something extraordinary” would soon intervene to reshape the course of their lives. In the Jubilee they envisioned, the government provided them with forty-acre lots and thereby emancipated them from dependency on their former masters. “This was no slight error, no trifling idea,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer reported from Mississippi in 1865, “but a fixed and earnest conviction as strong as any belief a man can ever have.”
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The feeling was sufficiently pervasive, in fact, to prompt thousands of freedmen in late 1865 to hold back on any commitment of their labor until the question of land had been firmly resolved.

The only real question among some blacks was not whether the lands belonging to the former slaveholders would be divided and distributed, but when and how. Freedmen in South Carolina heard that the large plantations along the coast were to be distributed. Equally persistent reports suggested that the lands on which the ex-slaves were working would be
divided among them. Few blacks in Mississippi, a Bureau officer reported in November 1865, expressed any interest in hiring themselves out for the next year. “Nearly all of them have heard, that at Christmas, Government is going to take the planters’ lands and other property from
them
, and give it to the colored people, and that, in this way they are going to begin to farm on their own account.” In a Virginia community, the freedmen had reportedly deposited their savings with “responsible” persons so as to be in the most advantageous position to purchase lots of “de confiscated land, as soon as de Gov’ment ready to sell it.” And in Georgia a black laborer was so certain that he “coolly” offered to sell to his former master the share of the plantation he expected to receive “after the division.”
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Although confident of retaining their lands, planters expressed growing concern over the extent to which the freedmen’s aspirations interfered with the normalization of agricultural operations. It proved difficult to raise crops when laborers went about “stuffed with the idea of proprietorship” and the anticipation of soon becoming their own employers. “You cannot beat into their thick skulls that the land & every thing else does not belong to them,” a South Carolina planter wrote his daughter. Since many whites refused to believe their blacks capable of formulating perceptions of freedom, they blamed the land mania on “fanatical abolitionists,” incendiary preachers, and the Yankee invaders. But those who had overheard the “curious” wartime discussions in which the blacks apportioned the lands among themselves knew better, as did the victims of black expropriation. Where planters had fled, abandoning their properties, the freed slaves had in numerous instances seized control and they gave little indication after the war of yielding their authority to the returning owners. Along the Savannah River, blacks under the leadership of Abalod Shigg seized two major plantations on the assumption that they were entitled to “forty acres and a mule.” Federal troops had to be called in to dislodge them. Elsewhere, similar seizures revealed the intensity of black feelings about the land and created a volatile situation that many native whites and Federal officials feared might erupt into armed confrontations.
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As if to confirm black land aspirations, the Federal government adopted an ambitious settlement program in direct response to the thousands of unwanted and burdensome freed slaves who had attached themselves to the Union Army in the wake of General Sherman’s march to the sea. On January 12, 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton conferred with twenty black ministers and church officers in Savannah to ascertain what could be done about these people. The delegation suggested that land was the key to black freedom. “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own,” the spokesmen for the group declared. Several days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, a far-reaching document that set aside for the exclusive use of the freedmen a strip of coastal land abandoned by Confederate owners between Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, granting black settlers “possessory titles” to forty-acre lots. Although intended only to deal
with a specific military and refugee problem, the order encouraged the growing impression among the freedmen that their Yankee liberators intended to provide them with an essential undergirding for their emancipation. That impression gained still further credence when Congress made the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau the custodian of all abandoned and confiscated land (largely the lands seized for nonpayment of the direct Federal tax or belonging to disloyal planters who had fled); ex-slaves and loyal Unionists could pre-empt forty-acre lots, rent them at nominal rates for three years, and purchase them within that period at a fair price (about sixteen times the annual rent). If the Bureau had implemented this provision, and if blacks had been able to accumulate the necessary funds, some 20,000 black families would have been provided with the means for becoming self-sustaining farmers.
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To apportion the large landed estates among those who worked them and who had already expended years of uncompensated toil made such eminent sense to the ex-slave that he could not easily dismiss this aspiration as but another “exaggerated” or “absurd” view of freedom. “My master has had me ever since I was seven years old, and never give me nothing,” observed a twenty-one-year-old laborer in Richmond. “I worked for him twelve years, and I think something is due me.” Expecting nothing from his old master, he now trusted the government to do “something for us.” The day a South Carolina rice planter anticipated trouble was when one of his field hands told him that “the land ought to belong to the man who (alone)
could work it
,” not to those who “sit in the house” and profit by the labor of others. Such sentiments easily translated into the most American of aspirations. “All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home,” a Mississippi black explained. With the acquisition of land, the ex-slave viewed himself entering the mainstream of American life, cultivating his own farm and raising the crops with which to sustain himself and his family. That was the way to respectability in an agricultural society, and the freedman insisted that a plot of land was all he required to lift himself up: “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.” And what better way to confirm their emancipation than to own the very land on which they had been working and which they had made productive and valuable by their own labor.
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The expectation of “forty acres and a mule” may have been sheer delusion, but the freedmen had sufficient reason to think otherwise. Since the outbreak of the war, many of them had overheard their masters talk in fearful tones about how the Yankees, if successful, would divide up the land among the blacks. The Freedmen’s Bureau, in fact, blamed the false expectations of land on Confederate slaveholders who had exploited the fear of confiscation during the war to arouse propertied whites to greater exertions and sacrifices. The deception was deliberately cultivated in some instances by planters who were determined to keep their ex-slaves until the
postwar crops had been harvested; at least, numerous disappointed freedmen recalled how they had been assured the Federal government would grant them plots of land after the completion of the agricultural season. When the Yankees finally arrived, they reinforced the land fever by assuring the freed slaves of their right to forty acres and a mule. When a Union soldier asked him if he had ever been whipped, West Turner of Virginia recalled, he had replied, “Yessir, boss, gimme thirty and nine any ole time.” Upon hearing this, the soldier advised him to take one acre of land for each time he had been whipped and an extra acre as a bonus. “So I measure off best I could forty acres of dat corn field an’ staked it out. De Yanks give all Fayette Jackson’s land away to de Negroes an plenty mo’ other Secesh land. But when Marse Jackson come back, we had to give it all up.”
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Although they might have had good reason to doubt the word of their masters and even the white Yankee troops, some freedmen claimed to have heard the same promises repeated by their own leaders. The fleeing slaves who boarded the Union gunboats on the Combahee River heard the reassuring refrain with which the much-idolized Harriet Tubman welcomed them:

Still further encouragement came from black soldiers and black missionaries, who sought to prepare their people for the responsibilities they would soon assume and placed particular emphasis on the imminent division of the lands. “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now,” a black preacher in Florida told an assemblage of field hands. “He ain’t got nuthin’ lef’ but his lan’, an’ de lan’ won’t be his’n long, fur de Guverment is gwine ter gie ter ev’ry Nigger forty acres of lan’ an’ a mule.”
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Within the first two years after the war, freedmen who embraced and acted upon the expectation of “forty acres and a mule” learned soon enough to face up to the possibility of disappointment. When some former Alabama slaves staked off the land they had been working and claimed it as their own, the owner quickly set matters straight: “Listen, niggers, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. You are just as free as I and the missus, but don’t go foolin’ around my land.” Of course, planters derived considerable comfort from the knowledge that Federal officials were prepared to confirm their property rights. Until the blacks acknowledged the futility of land expectations, the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized how difficult it would be to stabilize agricultural operations. With that sense of priorities, the Bureau instructed its agents to do everything in their power to disabuse the ex-slaves of any lingering illusions about taking over their masters’ lands. “This was the first difficulty that the Officers of the Bureau had to contend with,” a Mississippi officer wrote, “and nothing
but their efforts and explanations, kept off the storm. Even now, it is but a temporary settlement.” If the blacks refused to believe their old masters, Bureau agents were quite prepared to visit the plantations in person and impart the necessary confirmation: “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.” The blacks he encountered held so tenaciously to their illusions, a Bureau officer in Alabama observed, that “unless they see me and hear me refute the story, they persist in the belief.” Still other officers reported that the freedmen refused to believe them, too, or thought the question of land might be negotiable. After being told of the government’s policy, a Virginia freedman offered to lower his expectations to a single acre of land—“ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s house sets on.”
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