In forecasting the doom of the Afro-American race, many whites hastened to add their regrets that this should be the outcome of emancipation. The paternal spirit manifested itself in expressions of sympathy and remorse and in outbursts of nostalgia. “If you had seen them in slave days,” one planter told an English visitor, “what a merry, rollicking, laughing set they were! Now they are care-worn and sad. You hardly hear them laugh now as they used to do.” When the first postwar governor of Mississippi declared that the Negro was “destined to extinction, beyond all doubt,” he thought it “alarming” and “appalling” and hoped he might be mistaken; a South Carolina magistrate “pitied” the freedmen for their inability to understand the freedom thrust upon them; and the Virginia planter who expected the race to “first become pauper and then disappear” still wished the freedmen well and “sincerely” hoped they would disappoint his expectations. But there was good reason to suspect that professions of this kind were not altogether sincere. That is, the former ruling class had a peculiar stake in black failure.62
While traveling by rail through the countryside of western Tennessee, J. T. Trowbridge, the northern journalist and author, caught occasional glimpses of homeless ex-slaves huddled around the campfires in their makeshift settlements, warming their hands and watching with curiosity as the train rolled by them. The conversation he overheard of his fellow passengers might have been repeated almost anywhere in the South when native whites came across such scenes:
“That’s freedom! that’s what the Yankees have done for ’em!”
“They’ll all be dead before spring.”
“The Southern people were always their best friends. How I pity them! don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, of course I pity them! How much better off they were when they were slaves!”
What dismayed Trowbridge were not the remarks themselves (he had heard them so often) but the expressions of “grim exultation” and the “ ‘I-told-you-so!’ air of triumph” that accompanied them, as though their prophecies were their desires. “The slave-owners, having foretold that freedom would prove fatal to the bondman, experienced a satisfaction in seeing their predictions come true. The usual words of sympathy his condition suggested had all the hardness and hollowness of cant.”63
To think that the freedmen could possibly succeed defied logic and nature and contradicted the very reasons they had been held as slaves. How much more reassuring to argue that emancipation—unless properly controlled—sealed the race’s doom and that the abolitionists had succeeded only in expediting racial suicide. This belief rested, of course, on the popular assumption that the character and capacity of the Negro remained immutable; emancipation only filled his head with dreams and aspirations which could never be fulfilled. But that in itself raised a potentially dangerous situation requiring the utmost vigilance and understanding. If blacks should aspire to rise above their appointed station in life, the results were predictable. “Of course, they’ll fail,” an Alabama planter assured a northern visitor; “we have no uneasiness on that score; but we are the friends of these people, and we are sorry to see them expose themselves to so much misery in making attempts that we know from the outset must be abortive. Isn’t it better to have the laws in some way take the matter out of their hands and make them work?”64
If the African race was to survive, then, the old slaveholding class deemed it essential that they determine the conditions of survival—preferably a forced dependency allowing the freedman little or no opportunity to prove his own individual worth. Before emancipation, the planters had argued that they kept the Negro in bondage for his own benefit. Now they could contend that the freedman’s welfare demanded a condition of tutelage and a system of constructive compulsion. After all, to expect that self-interest alone would motivate ex-slaves, as it did whites, to be productive laborers was to betray ignorance of the race itself. “You don’t know the niggers,” a young Virginian told a northern reporter. “No nigger, free or slave, in these Southern States, nor in any part of the known world, ever would work or ever will work unless he’s made to.”65
6
ALTHOUGH THE FORMER SLAVEHOLDERS constituted a small minority of the white population of the South, nearly everyone still looked to them for leadership and supported the urgent need to impose controls on the newly freed blacks. To play on white fears of the Negro, moreover, as most planters recognized, served an important function in maintaining their own supremacy and in muting class antagonisms. Despite the abolition of slavery, the attitudes, fears, and assumptions which had helped to shape and reinforce that institution for over two centuries remained virtually unaffected. When the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner in Mississippi and Louisiana commented on the state of white opinion in the post-emancipation South, he invited attack as a northern partisan but the evidence was altogether too compelling to discount his conclusions:
Wherever I go—the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steamboat—I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a negro they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen affairs in their own hands, to use their own classic expression, “the niggers will catch hell.”
The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they may admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President’s emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate.66
No doubt some southern whites might have thought this a crude characterization of their thinking, but nearly every white man and woman readily agreed to the wisdom of restraining and controlling black men and women in ways that were not thought to be necessary for themselves. “The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them,” a northern reporter concluded after his travels in the postwar South. “I did not anywhere find a man who could see that laws should be applicable to all persons alike; and hence even the best men hold that each State must have a negro code.”67
Despite a white rhetoric that doomed the freedmen to self-extinction, most planters needed and demanded their labor. And despite all the talk about a childlike race, most whites expected blacks to work and behave like mature adults. Although the war and emancipation had, in the view of whites, filled the heads of their former slaves with unrealistic expectations and rendered their labor erratic, they refused to give up on them altogether, at least not until time-honored remedies proved ineffectual. Whether he had ever owned slaves or not, almost every white man remained convinced that only rigid controls and compulsion would curtail the natural propensity of blacks toward idleness and vagrancy, induce them to labor for others, and correct their mistaken notions about freedom and working for themselves. Claiming an intimate and exclusive knowledge of the Negro’s character (“We are the only ones that understand the nigger”), the former slaveholder demanded the necessary force to back up the traditional rights of authority over “his people,” including the punishment of deviant behavior. Without compulsion of some kind, the experiment in free labor could not succeed. It was as simple as that.68
The self-evident truth which the planter class now imparted to the freed slaves was that they must either work for white folks or starve. That advice differed in no significant way from what Federal officials had been telling blacks since the moment of liberation. “When that lesson has been thoroughly learned and inwardly digested,” a Macon newspaper declared, “the negro may perhaps be of some val
ue.” Whatever sympathies Northerners pretended for the Negro, southern whites assumed they could not object to a principle so universally accepted. “All we want,” a South Carolina planter told a northern visitor, “is that our Yankee rulers should give us the same privileges with regard to the control of labor which they themselves have.” When pressed for his understanding of northern labor controls, he indicated that laborers were bound by law to make an annual contract and could be punished for any violations. Told that no such laws existed in the North, the planter seemed incredulous. “How do you manage without such laws? How can you get work out of a man unless you compel him in some way?” The visitor replied that “Natural laws” sufficed, with the best laborers commanding the best wages. “You can’t do that way with niggers,” the planter immediately retorted. When comparing the two labor systems, some southern whites insisted, in fact, that this distinction be understood—the presence of the African race made the southern situation unique and demanded a unique response. “Northern laborers are like other men,” one planter explained, but “southern laborers are nothing but niggers, and you can’t make anything else out of them. They’re not controlled by the same motives as white men, and unless you have power to compel them, they’ll only work when they can’t beg or steal enough to keep from starving.”69
The urgency of the situation seemed obvious enough. To plant a crop without knowing how many laborers might be around to harvest it made postwar agricultural operations a highly risky venture. Henry W. Ravenel, for example, thought no planter would want to engage in such operations “without some guarantee that his labour is to be controlled & continued under penalties & forfeitures.” To make the free labor system work, some planters suggested that the ex-slaves be apprenticed to their former masters or to an employer of their choice. The apprenticeship laws enacted by a number of states imposed such controls on blacks under eighteen years of age who were orphans or whose parents could not or refused to support them. Such laws provided some planters with a cheap supply of involuntary labor (if he were deemed a “suitable” person, the former owner of the minor was given preference); at the same time, the arbitrary power these laws usually gave to the courts to bind out such children without the consent of their parents revived the specter of families forcibly separated.70
The idea of apprenticing nearly four million ex-slaves to their former masters never received serious consideration. Nor did the proposals to distribute the freed blacks equally around the country or to colonize them elsewhere make any sense to planters who desperately needed laborers.71 Anxious to regain control over their blacks, but not entirely indifferent to northern reactions, the planter class preferred to establish a docile black labor force in the guise of fulfilling their Christian duties and obligations to those who had once served them so well. Claiming sympathy for their former slaves, they demanded the controls necessary to make them once again “happy and prosperous.” To control and regulate the freedmen was to advance and protect the best interests of this unfortunate race, to help them restrain their “worst passions,” to redeem them from certain relapse into semi-barbarism, to save them from “inevitable failure,” to disabuse their minds of false illusions, and to assist them in finding their proper place in postwar southern society. “If they cannot (as they never can) occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c,” a North Carolina planter explained, “they may be useful as tillers of the soil, as handicraftsmen, as servants in various situations, and be happy in their domestic and family relations.… It is our Christian duty to encourage them to these ends.”72 That was putting the best possible face on the legislation adopted by most of the ex-Confederate states to regulate the freedmen—laws that came to be known collectively as the Black Codes.
To the white South, the principle seemed altogether clear and fair-minded: “Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by our white laws.” Although borrowing heavily from antebellum restrictions on free Negroes, as well as from northern apprenticeship laws and Freedmen’s Bureau and War Department regulations, the Black Codes were still very much a product of postwar southern thinking, both a legal expression of the lingering paternalism (to protect the ex-slave from himself) and a legislative response to immediate and pressing economic problems. While the Codes defined the freedman’s civil and legal rights, permitting him to marry, hold and sell property, and sue and be sued, the key provisions were those which defined him as an agricultural laborer, barred or circumscribed any alternative occupations, and compelled him to work. “Upon this point turns the entire question,” a South Carolina newspaper said of the principle of compulsion, “and as that is decided, so is the safety or ruin of this country.” If the Codes did not reestablish slavery, as some northern critics charged, neither did they recognize the former slaves as free men and women, entitled to equal protection under the law. As if to underscore how little had changed, a South Carolina law defined the two parties to a labor contract as “servants” and “masters.”73
Although the laws differed from state to state, the underlying principles and the major provisions remained the same. If found without “lawful employment,” a freedman could be arrested as a common vagrant, jailed and fined; if unable to pay the fine, he would be hired out to an employer who in turn assumed the financial liability and deducted it from the laborer’s wages. The Mississippi law also defined as vagrants any blacks unable or unwilling to pay a new tax to support Negro indigents, while the Alabama code included as vagrants “any runaway, stubborn servant or child” and any laborer “who loiters away his time” or fails to comply with the terms of his employment. Several of the codes also set down the hours of labor (from sunrise to sunset), the duties, and the behavior expected of black agricultural workers. With a sliding scale of fines for violations, the Louisiana code employed the kind of language a master might have once used in his instructions to the overseer:
Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect of duty, and leaving home without permission will be deemed disobedience; impudence, swearing, or indecent language to, or in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent, or quarreling and fighting with one another shall be deemed disobedience.74
Rather than expedite the slave’s transition to freedom or help him to realize his aspirations, the Black Codes embodied in law the widely held assumption that he existed largely for the purpose of raising crops for a white employer. Although the ex-slave ceased to be the property of a master, he could not aspire to become his own master. No law stated the proposition quite that bluntly but the provisions breathed that spirit in ways that could hardly be misunderstood. If a freedman decided that agricultural labor was not his special calling, the law often left him with no practical alternative. To discourage those who aspired to be artisans, mechanics, or shopkeepers, or who already held such positions, the South Carolina code, for example, prohibited a black person from entering any employment except agricultural labor or domestic service unless he obtained a special license and a certification from a local judge of his “skill and fitness” and “good moral character.” This provision, of course, threatened to undermine the position of the old free Negro class which had once nearly dominated the skilled trades in places like Charleston. With unconcealed intent, the Mississippi law simply required special licenses of any black wishing to engage in “irregular or job work.” To discourage freedmen who aspired to raise their own crops, Mississippi barred them from renting or leasing any land outside towns or cities, leaving to local authorities any restrictions they might wish to place on black ownership of real estate.
By adopting harsh vagrancy laws and restricting non-agricultural employment, the white South clearly intended to stem the much-feared drift of freedmen toward the cities and to underscore their status as landless agricultural laborers. Even as Mississippi forbade them to lease lands outside towns or cities, local ordinances there and in neighboring Louisiana made black resid
ency within the towns or cities virtually intolerable if not impossible. The ordinance adopted in Opelousas, Louisiana, deservedly served as a model and inspiration for other communities. To enter the town, a black person needed his employer’s permission, stipulating the object of the visit and the time necessary to accomplish it; any freedman found on the streets after ten o’clock at night without a written pass or permit from his employer would be subject to arrest and imprisonment. No freedman could rent or keep a house within the town limits “under any circumstances,” or reside within the town unless employed by a white person who assumed responsibility for his conduct. To hold any public meetings or to assemble in large numbers for any reason, blacks needed the mayor’s permission, as they also did to “preach, exhort or otherwise declaim” to black congregations. Nor could they possess weapons or sell, barter, or exchange any kind of merchandise without special permits. A freedman found violating these ordinances could be punished by imprisonment, fines, and forced labor on the city streets. Virtually identical ordinances were adopted in several Louisiana towns and parishes, with St. Landry Parish adding its own brand of punishment: “confining the body of the offender within a barrel placed over his or her shoulders, in the manner practiced in the army,” for a period not to exceed twelve hours. While finding the ordinances “incompatible with freedom,” the black newspaper in New Orleans noted that freedmen could walk the streets up to ten o’clock at night—one hour later than under slavery. “This additional hour is the fruit of our victories in the field,” the editor declared; “four years of a bloody war have been fought to gain that one hour. The world certainly moves in that quarter.”75
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