Been in the Storm So Long (96 page)

The plantation “strike,” not always easy to define, could be a complex affair, testing the ability of the workers to maintain a solid front against the planter’s threat to evict them and the probability of Federal intervention. On a Louisiana plantation, when the hands struck for the immediate payment of their wages and the right of each of them to have an acre of land for his exclusive cultivation, the proprietor retaliated by refusing to meet with them, calling in the Freedmen’s Bureau, and locking up the mules—that is, turning a “strike” into a “lockout” and preventing the workers from returning to their tasks without his permission. The Bureau agent resolved the crisis, largely by rebuking the strike leader for his insolent language and threatening to arrest him for breach of contract; at the same time, he sought to exploit differences among the blacks about the advisability of their action. “Dey didn’t want to quit,” several of them indicated, “but dere was no use in deir wuckin’ by demselves, cause de rest ’d say dey was a turnin’ gin deir own color an’ a sidin’ wid de wite folks.” To a northern visitor, who had witnessed the strike, the Freedmen’s Bureau had once again proven its worth. “I knew that but for this very agent not less than a dozen heavy planters would have been compelled to suspend operations. All availed themselves of his services.”
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Along with evidence of collective action, the plantations would also yield leaders capable of mobilizing black laborers. Although some drivers and preachers retained the influence they had exercised before the war, the continuity in leadership is difficult to determine. On the Sea Islands, a Bureau officer investigating labor troubles placed the blame on “oracles” among the freedmen, “and as
they
go, so go the whole without stopping to consider.” Not uncommonly, a Bureau officer would determine that a particular individual on the plantation had provoked the others to action and he would dismiss him from the place. On the “old Combahee” plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina, a planter complained of “insolent” laborers who appeared to follow in the steps of Bob Jenkins, a black “firebrand” he had previously ordered off his place. Two Bureau agents investigated the dispute, one of them J. J. Wright, a black man who would subsequently play an important role in the Radical state government. In his report,
Wright cited the testimony of the foreman, who claimed that the planter had tried to speed up the work and Jenkins “knew a great deal and that was the reason he was called a firebrand.” Several weeks later, a white Bureau agent visited the same place, ordered the people to return to work, and quickly disposed of Jenkins. “This man’s influence was so evidently bad that I ordered him to leave the place.”
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Of growing concern, too, were black agitators who belonged to no plantation but who allegedly aroused the freedmen. Aaron Bradley, who had migrated from Massachusetts to Georgia, remained a controversial figure throughout Reconstruction; as early as 1865, he elicited strong reactions from Bureau officers:

Two years later, after Bradley encouraged blacks to take possessory title of certain lands, Bureau officers again cited his “pernicious influence over the more ignorant of the freed people” and asked for authority to banish him from the region.
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The organized efforts of black laborers to improve working conditions were not limited to the plantations. Again, the number of successes achieved may have been less important than the possibilities revealed by such efforts. The “new phenomenon” of black stevedores in Charleston refusing to work for less than two dollars a day was sufficiently spectacular to be noted in the leading northern working-class newspaper, as was the decision of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Memphis to break a strike of levee workers before it erupted into a full-scale riot. In 1866 and 1867, strikes also broke out among city laborers in Nashville, tobacco workers in Richmond, lumberyard workers in Washington, D.C., and stevedores in New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah. The Savannah strike elicited particular attention, if only because white and black stevedores combined to resist a new tax imposed on their occupation; the police intervened but confined its arrests and beatings to the black workers.
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In New Orleans, black stevedores had to be restrained from lynching a contractor who had allegedly defrauded them of their wages; the police rescued the contractor, while a detachment of troops dispersed the more than five hundred stevedores who had assembled to express their grievances. In late 1865, even as many whites feared an imminent black uprising, New Orleans looked upon the rare sight of black and white stevedores joining forces to strike for higher wages. The mayor himself conceded the impressive quality of such an event, particularly the demonstration of racial unity among the workers. “They marched up the levee in a long procession, white and black together. I gave orders that they should not be interfered with as long as
they interfered with nobody else; but when they undertook by force to prevent other laborers from working, the police promptly put a stop to their proceedings.”
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Whatever the promise of such combined efforts, neither white trade unions nor the black press would permit them to herald a new era in urban labor relations. When it came down to admitting blacks into the few existing trade unions, the racial barriers were impregnable. “At present, we have nothing to do with the negro,” a white carpenter in Richmond declared at a meeting of his union, “but the time is coming, and we must prepare ourselves to say to this dark sea of misery, ‘thus far shalt thou come, but no farther.’ ” Noting that sentiment, a Richmond black predicted “an irrepressible conflict between the white and the black mechanics of the South,” now that the whites had been contaminated by the same “devilish prejudice” that ostracized black mechanics in the North. In New Orleans, meanwhile, the
Tribune
, voice of the free colored community, adopted a stance during the stevedores’ strike that anticipated the generally hostile attitude of black middle-class leadership toward trade unions and strikes. “Poor negroes,” it said of blacks beaten for continuing to work, “abused when suspected of being unwilling to work, and mauled when ready to labor!” When stevedores took to the streets to mobilize support for their strike, the newspaper lamented the number of blacks among them, noting how “their white fellow-workers despise them under ordinary circumstances.” After the laborers returned to their jobs at the old wages, the newspaper could only conclude, “Such is generally the folly of strikes.”
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Whether on the plantations or in the cities, black workers confronted obstacles not unfamiliar to white laborers in the North. Since any work stoppage during the agricultural season necessarily required a breach of contract, field hands found themselves in an even more precarious position. The decision to cease work could not be made easily, involving as it did the possibility of eviction with a loss of accrued wages and the probability of Federal intervention. Not long after a Union commander announced his intention to remove all laborers who failed to conclude agreements with their employers, a group of freedmen near Savannah refused to renew a contract they thought to be unfair. But neither were they willing to move, even when a Bureau agent and five soldiers ordered them to do so. The agent returned with fifty soldiers, the blacks “crowded together in solid phalanx and swore more furiously than before that they would die where they stood,” each side leveled guns at the other, and the soldiers withdrew. But the point had been made, and blacks knew full well they could not stand for long against an entire army.
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If judged by certain isolated examples, the possibilities might have seemed truly promising, perhaps even momentous. The planters owned the land, while the freedmen commanded the labor, and each side reserved the right to use that power to exact concessions from the other, with the differences finally resolved through negotiations. That state of affairs encouraged the black newspaper in South Carolina to think that a new day
had dawned. “It takes two to make a bargain now-a-days,” the editor exulted after noting that the former slaves no longer had to contract with their former owner simply because he desired it. But the new era envisioned by this newspaper died in infancy. Appreciating where the power still resided, the employer could hold out against the “extravagant” demands of his laborers, thinking that by January they would be forced to work at whatever terms he dictated. More often than not, that turned out to be a correct assumption. “They thought, by standing out, they could force me to terms about their mules and cotton,” the agent of a Louisiana planter remarked. “But I soon undeceived them. I rigged up the carts, packed their traps into them, and sent them bag and baggage off the place.… Now they’re sneaking back every day and asking leave to enter into contract.”
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Despite the triumphs scored by the field hand on some plantations, particularly in regions where a scarcity of labor prevailed, the bargaining power he wielded with his right to reject a contract proved far less formidable in practice than in theory. “What kin we do, sah?” an underpaid laborer in Virginia asked; “dey kin give us jes what dey choose. Man couldn’t starve, nohow; got no place to go; we ’bleege to take what dey give us.” In the North, white workers came to learn comparable lessons about that much-cherished right to bargain with an employer—that is, they could work at whatever wages and under whatever conditions their hungriest competitors were willing to accept or not work at all. In the postwar South, the options seemed even more limited. If the laborer chose to hold out for better terms, he could be evicted, with the planter free to call on Federal authorities for assistance. If the laborer voluntarily left the plantation, dissatisfied with the previous year’s meager earnings and disinclined to contract for still another year of the same, how would he support himself? To whom could he turn? Although the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized his right to contract elsewhere, it insisted that he contract with some employer; if not, he could be arrested for vagrancy, incarcerated for a brief time, forced to work on the public streets, and finally hired out to an employer under a contract arbitrarily prepared by the Bureau officer. If he chose to work elsewhere, he also faced in some regions the possibility of being blacklisted by other planters, particularly if he had a previous record as a malcontent or rebel. Dissatisfied with conditions, a laborer in Guilford County, North Carolina, left his place of employment and settled a few miles down the road. “I gathered up some o’ our boys,” his former employer declared, “and we went down to this place whar I thought he was at, and told him he’d make tracks before night, and if he was found in this neighborhood arter next day we’d shoot him wharever we found him.… We a’n’t agoin’ to let niggers walk over us.” Finally, if laborers combined among themselves to resist a contract they considered unacceptable, they faced the likelihood of intervention by local militia units or Federal troops.
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Having found no alternative that could sustain them, the vast majority of blacks returned each year to their familiar labors under a contractual
arrangement. But it often proved to be a precarious truce rather than a planters’ jubilee. Although blacks found their bargaining power sharply circumscribed, that did not guarantee the quality of their subsequent labor or an orderly plantation. The opprobrium heaped upon black labor in 1865 would be repeated with even greater regularity and the usual expressions of dismay in subsequent years—disregard for contracts, erratic work, arrogant behavior, insolent language, and a contempt for any kind of authority. Few planters considered themselves more exemplary in their behavior and attitudes than Everard Green Baker of Panola, Mississippi. As a slaveholder, he claimed to have made every effort to keep his blacks “joyous and happy,” and the wartime experience no doubt solidified his self-image. While the slaves of neighboring planters fled, his blacks showed “their good sense & stood true to mine & their interests.” After emancipation, they remained with him, and in January 1866 he noted how “cheerfully” they went to work—“perhaps better than any others in the neighborhood.” Six months later, however, for reasons Baker found inexplicable, his freedmen worked only “tolerably,” failing to report early in the morning and remaining in their cabins for two or three hours at noon. “I do not think I will be bothered any more with freedmen,” the discouraged planter confided to his diary. One year later, he added a footnote to that entry: “I had better have adhered to the above resolution. I did not & much regret it.”
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Even if they successfully contracted with their work force, some planters found little relief in the day-to-day ordeal of supervising free black laborers, many of whom refused to surrender their newly acquired prerogatives or accommodate themselves to a contract they had been compelled to sign. On the plantations in South Carolina she had managed since the death of her husband in 1864, Adele Allston had endured work stoppages and near rebellions. With each new crisis her confidence ebbed still further until finally her patience ran out. “Negroes will soon be placed upon an exact equality with ourselves,” she wrote in late 1866, “and it is in vain for us to strive against it.” In 1869, after most of her properties had been sold at auction, she retired to Chicora Wood, her sole possession, and planted a few acres of rice. With similar resignation, Ethelred Philips, the Florida physician and farmer, replaced his “worthless” black servants with “a poor ignorant white girl” and contemplated removing himself and his family to California, where they might be free of “the
everlasting negro”
rather than have to wait out his inevitable extinction. “They have the China man in place of the African and do what they please with
him
and no one cares about it—he does not happen to be fashionable color.”
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