Been in the Storm So Long (95 page)

On the plantations in Louisiana he managed for the absentee owner, Wilmer Shields experienced that now characteristic period of indecision and maneuvering before obtaining any success with the laborers. The almost always exhausting process of negotiating a contract would begin in the early fall and continue into the next year. In mid-September 1866, for example, Shields already despaired of retaining most of the laborers beyond the present crops. Not only did he find the blacks “very fond of change” but “all of our neighbors want them, and some are offering every inducement they can to get them away—promising teams and horses to take them to town every Saturday.” By November, only a few laborers had indicated they intended to remain, “most of
these
worth but little—being either old or sickly.” The others had begun to make clear the new conditions
they would insist upon—a five-day workweek, the use of horses and teams for occasional trips to Natchez, more pay, a school, “and many other things.” If Shields refused to budge on these demands, the freedmen threatened to take their labor elsewhere, and he knew only too well how willing his neighbors were to oblige.

In mid-December, a laborer told Shields he thought “the
whole of Saturday
and a school would keep nearly all.” The manager had no objection to a school but he strongly advised his employer against any concessions to a five-day workweek; meanwhile, he prepared to stop issuing any food rations to laborers who refused to sign after the old contract expired. On January 1, the moment of decision neared. “The cry with our people now is, that we are too strict and do not pay enough.” Several of the neighboring planters, in the meantime, had made offers that proved to be irresistible. “He has nothing whatever to do with his place,” Shields said of one nearby planter. “Not a word to say—The Negroes manage all and are to give him one half.” When the expected “stampede” came to his plantations, Shields was thus not altogether surprised. But a sufficient number remained, largely because they wished “to be at home” and they doubted the honesty of the neighboring planters. The final settlement closely resembled the original proposal, with the hands choosing between cash wages (double the previous year’s rates) and an interest in the crop; the employer did concede the establishment of a school, though the freedmen were to pay for the teacher and his tenure would rest on his “good behaviour.” To replace the losses, Shields tried to hire other laborers but with little success. “They demand exorbitant wages—And the more the white owner of the soil yields, the more they require.”
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Where a considerable demand for black labor prevailed, planters found it difficult to sustain a united front against potentially ruinous competition. Vying with each other for scarce field hands, very much as Shields’s neighbors had, employers sometimes assumed the most solicitous airs to induce blacks to contract with them. No doubt to incur favor with his freedmen, John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, found himself driving a wagonload of them to a nearby community, where they could attend a “Negro barbecue” and dance through the night. Adele Allston tried to satisfy her laborers by stocking the plantation with “some extras, such as beef etc.,” while another South Carolina planter modified his original terms by giving a freedman “more time to work for himself.” The Reverend Samuel Agnew thought his father “had no alternative” but to accede to the extravagant demands of a valued laborer, although he thought he had
reached an agreement with the man for a lesser sum the previous week. “But he [the laborer] could get more and he took advantage of circumstances.” Hard-pressed for laborers, a Mississippi planter ventured to New Orleans and offered a black labor agent five dollars a head for all the men he could obtain; the agent prepared to accommodate the planter but upon learning where the freedmen were to be sent he refused any further assistance, saying he would not send a black man to Mississippi for a hundred dollars a head. “And why?” the outraged planter bellowed afterwards. “All because the sassy scoundrel said he didn’t like our Mississippi laws.”
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Where employers had gained a reputation for abusing their laborers, whether with the whip or the pen, they might lose all of them at the end of the season and find it exceedingly difficult to attract any replacements. “The Negroes have a kind of telegraph by which they know all about the treatment of the Negroes on the plantations for a great distance around,” a Florida planter observed. And they obviously availed themselves of such knowledge before they contracted with anyone, the local Bureau agent added, after finding some planters unable to secure a single laborer. If the freedmen decided to remain with such an employer or hire out to him, they were apt to do so only after driving a hard bargain. In the Ogeechee district of Georgia, a planter with a notorious reputation among the local blacks had to offer one half the crop rather than the customary one third; at the same time, he agreed to divide his land into plots and permit the blacks to work them as they chose without any white supervisors. That seemed eminently fair to one local freedman; after all, he remarked, “when a man has been burned in the fire once you cannot make him run in again.”
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A
LTHOUGH SLAVERY
had never precluded a certain amount of bargaining, culminating at times in verbal understandings about work routines and the limits of authority, the first years of emancipation created new possibilities and a host of novel experiences in labor relations. When former slaves and former slaveholders confronted each other as employees and employers, conflicts were bound to arise and in numerous instances the deadlocks which resulted clearly resembled strikes and lockouts. After investigating disturbances on plantations in Coahoma County, Mississippi, a Freedmen’s Bureau officer came away deeply impressed with the sense of unity manifested by the black laborers. “I find that when one or more Freedman becomes dissatisfied others are very liable to sympathize with him, and in case one leaves, others will follow.” That same inclination to vent their grievances and press their demands collectively rather than as individuals pervaded low-country South Carolina, where the freedmen finally gave up the expectation of land only to demand control of the crops. “It is really wonderful how unanimous they are,” a sympathetic Bureau
agent reported; “communicating like magic, and now holding out, knowing the importance of every day in regard to the welfare of the next crop;—thinking that the planters will be obliged to come to their terms.”
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Apart from the obvious advantages of collective action at contract time, the same unity would be maintained during the year to protect laborers from physical abuse and to support them in any reinterpretation of the contract they deemed essential to their welfare. On a Mississippi plantation, the employer managed somehow to write into the contract a stipulation that if the freedmen failed to work satisfactorily, she reserved the right to hire additional laborers at their expense. But when she invoked the clause, the freedmen threatened to drive the new men off the plantation and eventually won a favorable decision from the local Bureau agent. Nor could a planter, as in the old days, single out a freedman for punishment and gather the other hands around to witness the proceedings as a lesson to all of them. When a Mississippi proprietor (a former Union officer) attempted to tie a freedman up by the thumbs for his impudence and refusal to work, nearly every laborer quit work and several of them went to an adjoining plantation to mobilize assistance; the planter soon faced a formidable group armed with rifles “and other war-like weapons” and immediately called upon the Bureau to rush him some support.
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With similar displays of unity and various degrees of success, freedmen protested delays in paying them for their work, forcibly resisted attempts by Union soldiers to search their cabins for furniture allegedly belonging to their employer, and refused to work on the public roads (charging that most whites were exempted from such labor).
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When “a very large assemblage” of blacks convened in a South Carolina community in late 1866, the speakers dwelled on the inadequacy of one third of the crop as compensation for the labor they had performed the previous year. The only conditions under which they should now contract, they agreed, would be for an equal division of the crops among those who labored and those who owned the land. To a local white who observed the proceedings, the meeting assumed “the character of a strike for higher wages” but he found no cause for alarm and applauded the speakers for their advice to act calmly, prudently, and in conformity with the law. Whether or not such meetings were specifically intended to counter similar “combinations” among white employers, black laborers in various parts of the South thought they could strengthen their bargaining position by agreeing on a common set of demands, including the minimum amount of compensation for which they were willing to work. Significantly, they understood the need to involve all the plantations in the region and even to agree on penalties that would be meted out to those blacks who broke their solid front. In Cherokee County, Alabama, the blacks pledged themselves not to work for less than $2.00 a day during the harvest and assessed a penalty of fifty lashes for any among them who agreed to work for less. (White laborers subsequently gathered the harvest at $1.50 a day.) In Rowan County, North Carolina, the freedmen simply resolved that anyone
who worked for less than a certain sum would “have to abide the consequences.”
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Although such examples (unique even for white workers) might well have been exceptional, they suggested a potential that could have had a profound impact on labor and race relations. At least, the prospects were sufficiently alarming to prompt many whites to concoct new notions of conspiracy and revolution.

Aside from the freedmen’s work habits, nothing concerned planters and Federal authorities more in 1866 and 1867 than the widely reported proliferation of organizations among plantation laborers. Since most of them were not easily identifiable, they seemed all the more menacing. Near the end of 1866, alarming reports reached the Charleston office of the Freedmen’s Bureau that freedmen in the Kingstree region were organized into six armed military companies which drilled and marched “under Red flags,” threatened white families, and intimidated blacks who refused to join them. Upon investigating these sensational rumors, the Bureau officer found that the freedmen in this region did, indeed, meet regularly to agree on minimal demands for the next year of labor; the sole threat they had issued was to migrate to Florida if they could not obtain “reasonable and just” terms. If any of them possessed arms, the agent reported, they did so with no violent intent but from “the foolish habit into which they have fallen of carrying guns wherever they travel.” Still, the Bureau agent thought it advisable to station a detachment of Union troops in the area for “the moral effect” it might have on both white and black residents.
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Any kind of organization among plantation hands, whether intended for protective, benevolent, or economic purposes, was bound to create consternation in the white populace and revive old specters. The conclusion of Bureau officers that most of the organizations rumored to be military in nature were actually designed to exact economic concessions hardly allayed white fears. The ostensible purpose of meetings of black laborers may be “a strike for higher wages,” a white resident of Halifax County, North Carolina, warned the governor, “but I believe the real design is to organize for a General massacre of the White population. Nearly every negro is armed not only with a Gun, but a revolver.… I am not one to get up an alarm for a trifle, or to raise a noise because some one else does, but the meeting of a thousand or two of negroes every other Sunday, with Officers and Drilling, I think a serious matter.… I
hope you will not use my name
in connection with this matter, as it may cost me my life.”
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The fears provoked by organized action among black laborers proved to be more than illusory. Since the early days of emancipation, whites and Federal authorities alike had considerable difficulty distinguishing between black work stoppages and insurrections. The confusion was at times perfectly understandable. When a South Carolina planter heard that blacks on a nearby plantation were “organized after military fashion” and had posted guards on the roads leading to the place, he could hardly be blamed for thinking in terms of an insurrection rather than a strike. The events that transpired on a plantation near Georgetown could also easily
evoke the old fears. On March 31, 1866, a freedman named Abram left the field on which he had been working and called the other laborers out with him; after arming themselves with axes, hatchets, hoes, and poles, they drove the black agent of the proprietor off the premises. Finally, two Union soldiers were called in to help quell the uprising, and the planter and his agent prepared to restore order. “As soon as we entered the street the people collected with axes, hoes, sticks and bricks and pelted us with bricks and stones and poles, and took the gun away from one of the soldiers.” The reports of blacks taking possession of plantations were not uncommon in the postwar years, but the purpose of their action was not always clear. In a number of instances, at least, the blacks did not actually lay claim to the land but challenged the proprietor’s right to dictate to them and to dispose of the crops they had raised.
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