Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  Your freedom will expose you to some new troubles. Bad men will take advantage of your ignorance and impose upon you. Some will try to defraud you of your wages, and a few may be wicked and cowardly enough to revenge their losses upon you by violence. But let none of these things provoke you to evil deeds. It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.

  No doubt many Bureau agents took comfort in the impact of their message. “The Negro is often suspicious of his former master and will not believe him,” the subcommissioner in Jackson, Mississippi, observed, “but when assured by the Federal authorities that he must go to work and behave himself, he does so contentedly.” That made it all the more imperative, he thought, “for the good of the Negro and the peace of the Country,” to have Bureau representatives visit every part of their districts.103 The manager of a plantation in Bolivar County, Mississippi, heartily agreed. “If you would send an agent here to look into matters, and give some advice, I would be pleased to have him make his quarters with me for a week or two.” With unconcealed enthusiasm, a planter near Columbia, South Carolina, welcomed the advice a Bureau official gave to his laborers. “You’re their best friend, they all know,” he told him, “and I’m very glad you’ve come down this way.” The planter had good reason to be grateful. Until the official’s visit, the freedmen had thought they owned the plantation.104

  Acting in what they deemed to be the best interests of the ex-slaves, the strongest and proven advocates of the freedmen’s cause admonished them to prove their fitness for freedom by laboring as faithfully as they had as slaves—and even more productively. “Plough and plant, dig and hoe, cut and gather in the harvest,” General Rufus Saxton urged them. “Let it be seen that where in slavery there was raised a blade of corn or a pound of cotton, in freedom there will be two.” Along with Saxton, few whites were more committed to the freedmen than Clinton B. Fisk, a Bureau official who subsequently helped to found one of the first black colleges. And he doubtless thought himself to be speaking in their best interests when he advised the freedmen to remain in their old places and work for their former masters.

  You have been associated with them for many years; you are bound to the old home by many ties, and most of you I trust will be able to get on as well with your late masters as with anyone else.… He is not able to do without you, and you will, in most cases, find him as kind, honest, and liberal as other men. Indeed he has for you a kind of family affection.… Do not think that, in order to be free, you must fall out with your old master, gather up your bundles and trudge off to a strange city. This is a great mistake. As a general rule, you can be as free and as happy in your old home, for the present, as any where else in the world.105

  Consistent with such advice, Freedmen’s Bureau officials made every effort to rid the urban centers of black refugees and to force them back onto the plantations. (Ironically, the very presence of the Bureau in the towns and villages had induced many ex-slaves to settle there, thinking they might be more secure with Federal protection nearby.) A successful Bureau officer in Culpeper, Virginia, was able to report that “this village was overrun with freedmen when I took charge here, but I have succeeded in getting the most of them out into the country on farms. The freedmen are, almost without an exception, going to work, most of them by the year.”106

  Having been established to facilitate the transition from slavery to freedom, the Bureau faced an admittedly immense task. With limited personnel and funds, it was forced to operate on a number of levels, providing the newly freed slaves with food rations and medical care, assisting them in their education, helping to reunite families, relocating thousands of ex-slaves on abandoned lands, and transporting still more to areas where the scarcity of labor commanded higher wages. In its most critical role as a labor mediator, the Bureau set out to correct abuses in contracts, establish “fair” wage rates, force employers to pay what they had promised, and break up planter conspiracies to depress wages. “What we wish to do is plain enough,” a Bureau officer in North Carolina announced. “We desire to instruct the colored people of the South, to lift them up from subserviency and helplessness into a dignified independence and citizenship.”107

  The attempts to implement these policies and lofty objectives revealed varying ranges of competence and dedication within the Bureau’s personnel. In theory, a northern reporter wrote, the Bureau unquestionably “stands as the next friend of the blacks,” but “practically, and in the custom of the country,” he concluded after several months of observation, “it appears to stand too often as their next enemy.” The agent he met in a South Carolina community typified for him the Bureau mentality. Empowered to examine labor contracts and determine the validity of planter and freedmen grievances, he demonstrated little or no sympathy for the very people he had been dispatched to protect. “He doesn’t really intend to outrage the rights of the negroes, but he has very little idea that they have any rights except such as the planters choose to give them.” Henry M. Turner, the prominent black clergyman, shared this dim view of the Bureau in operation. Based upon his travels in Georgia and his conversations with numerous freedmen, Turner concluded that although Bureau agents professed “to do much good,” many of them appeared to be “great tyrants” who were utterly incapable of understanding the problems of his people.108

  Whatever directives flowed out of the national office, the crucial power of the Freedmen’s Bureau rested with the state and local officials, many of whom were former soldiers and officers who looked upon their positions as sinecures rather than opportunities to protect the ex-slaves in their newly acquired rights. The competence of individual agents varied enormously, as did the quality of the commitment they brought to their jobs. Under difficult, even hazardous circumstances, some Bureau agents braved the opposition of native whites as well as Federal authorities to protect the freedmen from fraud, harassment, and violence; among these agents were whites imbued with the old abolitionist commitment and a small group of blacks, including Martin R. Delany, B. F. Randolph, and J. J. Wright, all of them holding posts in South Carolina.109 But many of the field agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau coveted acceptance by the communities in which they served and became malleable instruments in the hands of the planter class, eager to service their labor needs and sharing similar views about the racial character and capacity of black people and the urgent need to control them. The New Orleans Tribune tried to be as sympathetic toward the Freedmen’s Bureau as its observations would permit: in the midst of a hostile population, the agents had little choice but to act cautiously; their acquaintances were almost always whites and each day they were subjected to “false impressions and misrepresentations.” Under such conditions, the editor charged, the legitimate grievances of black laborers were understandably “treated with contempt”—that is, if they were considered at all. In a recent visit to Amite City, in St. Helena Parish, he found that most of the blacks were unaware of the presence of the Bureau. “The representatives of the federal power are lost in the crowd,” the editor observed; “and feeling themselves powerless, they are wasting time the best they can, and do not hurt the feelings of any body.” To “make Abolition a truth,” he suggested that black troops be stationed there. “Up to this time, Emancipation has only been a lie—in most of our parishes.”110

  No matter how a Bureau agent interpreted his mission, the tasks he faced were formidable. At the very outset, the extent of territory for which he was responsible reduced his effectiveness. “My satrapy,” a South Carolina agent recalled, “contained two state districts or counties, and eventually three, with a population of about eighty thousand souls and an area at least two thirds as large as the state of Connecticut. Consider the absurdity of expecting one man to patrol three thousand miles and make personal visitations to thirty thousand Negroes.” The questions an agent needed to answer and act upon were equally demanding. If a slaveholder had removed his blacks during the war to a “safe” area, who bore the responsibility for returning them to their origi
nal homes? If blacks had planted crops in the master’s absence, who should reap the profits? Could a former master confiscate the personal possessions a black had accumulated as his slave? If a black woman had borne the children of a master, who assumed responsibility for them in freedom? Could the ex-slaveholders expel from their plantations the sick and elderly blacks no longer able to support themselves? Compared to the numerous disputes involving the interpretation of contracts, the division of crops, and acts of violence, these were almost trivial questions, but even the best-intentioned agents had few guidelines to help them reach a decision. The Bureau officer, a South Carolina agent recalled, needed to be “a man of quick common sense, with a special faculty for deciding what not to do. His duties and powers were to a great extent vague, and in general he might be said to do best when he did least.”111

  No sooner had he taken office than the typical Bureau agent found himself besieged by planters wanting to know what terms and punishments they could impose on their blacks. That would constitute the bulk of his work, along with the many complaints of freedmen who had suffered fraud, abuse, and violence at the hands of their employers. Unfortunately, few Bureau agents possessed the ability, the patience, or the sympathy to deal with the grievances of the freedmen, even to recognize their legitimacy, and the ex-slave had no way of knowing what to expect if he should file a complaint. To do so, he might have to travel anywhere from ten to fifty miles to the nearest Bureau office, where he was apt to find an agent “who rides, dines, and drinks champagne with his employer” and viewed any complainant as some kind of troublemaker. Even the more sympathetic agents were not always able to consider the freedman’s grievances with the seriousness they deserved.

  The majority of the complaints brought before me came from Negroes. As would naturally happen to an ignorant race, they were liable to many impositions, and they saw their grievances with big eyes.… With pomp of manner and of words, with a rotundity of voice and superfluity of detail which would have delighted Cicero, a Negro would so glorify his little trouble as to give one the impression that humanity had never before suffered the like.112

  The ways in which a local Bureau agent or provost marshal considered the grievance of a freedman often differed markedly from the deference paid to a prominent planter. In Liberty, Virginia, for example, the local superintendent of freedmen’s affairs—a sergeant in the Union Army—listened to a black laborer’s account of a severe beating he had suffered at the hands of his employer.

  “What did you do to him? You’ve been sassy?”

  “No, boss; never was sassy; never was sassy nigger sence I’se born.”

  “Well, I suppose you were lazy.”

  “Boss, I been working all de time; ask any nigger on de plantashn ef I’se ever lazy nigger. Me! me and dem oder boys do all de work on de plantashn same as ’foretime.”

  “Well, then, what did he strike you for?”

  “Dat jest it, sah. Wot’d he strike me for? Dar ar jest it. I done nothin’.”

  “How many of you are there on the plantation?”

  “Right smart family on de plantashn, sah. Dunno how many.”

  “Did he strike any other boy but you?”

  “No, sah, me one.”

  “You must have been doing something?”

  “No, boss; boss, I tell you; I’se in at de quarters, me and two o’dem boys, and he came in de do’, jump on me wid a stick, say ‘he teach me.’ ”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Run, come yer.”

  “Well, now you go back home and go to your work again; don’t be sassy, don’t be lazy when you’ve got work to do; and I guess he won’t trouble you.”113

  This freedman fared better than the many blacks who testified that local agents refused even to listen to their complaints but ordered them back to work and threatened them with deportation. Confronted with an employer unwilling to pay him his share of the crop and with threats to burn down his house (because he conducted classes there), a North Carolina freedman carried his appeal to General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau’s head commissioner, after the local agent had refused to intercede.114

  Even where a Bureau official tried to act on behalf of a freedman, he might find himself frustrated by military authorities, whose support he needed to enforce his decisions but whose sympathies often lay with the native whites. In some regions, military officers not connected with the Bureau collected fees for approving labor contracts and paid little attention to the provisions. Captain Randolph T. Stoops, the provost marshal in Columbia, Virginia, readily conceded his lack of concern in such matters but thought it perfectly justified. “As to the price of labour I have nothing to do with it. The citizens held a meeting some time since and made a price to suit themselves.… When Farmers bring the negro before me to have written agreements between them whatever price is agreed upon between them I enter on the article and consider them bound to fulfill the agreement whatever it may be.” Often over the protests of sympathetic Bureau agents, military authorities permitted employers to mete out punishments to recalcitrant blacks or imposed their own form of discipline. That was how Captain Stoops dealt with the problem of blacks “swarming the streets” of the town in which he was stationed. “There being no jail or place of confinement I resorted to the wooden horse and making them work on the streets. Such punishment I found beneficial for in a short time I found almost every negro for some distance, had gone to work and was doing well.… Fright has more to do with it than anything else.”115

  To keep the freed slaves on the old plantations and to force them into contracts with an employer doubtless helped a local Bureau official to win a degree of toleration in an otherwise hostile community. But at the same time, he easily persuaded himself that he was acting in the best interests of the freedmen. After all, the Bureau officer in Vicksburg observed, wherever the freedmen were “submissive and perform the labor they contract to do in good faith,” the native whites treated them “with kindness.” If the blacks themselves remained unconvinced of the Bureau’s good intentions, an official could reason that they had only recently been released from bondage and were in no position to know what was best for them. The more the freedmen resisted their advice, the more Bureau officials insisted on it, justifying their positions by the number of ex-slaves they had induced to return to work. Upon assuming his post in Jackson, Mississippi, Captain J. H. Weber found the city “full to overflowing with stragglers from the plantations.” He immediately ordered the troops under his command to round up the “stragglers” and put them to work on the city streets.

  The result was surprising; it stopped in short order the influx of stragglers, and saved the soldiers the labor of cleaning up the City. The stragglers began to learn, and those coming in learned from them that they could not remain here in idleness—they went back to their homes contented to go to work again. I have gathered up in this way, more than three hundred, and as planters and others have called for laborers, I have turned those thus gathered up over to them …

  With equal satisfaction, a Bureau officer in southern Mississippi boasted that his “presence and authority,” backed by troops when needed, had “kept the negroes at work, and in a good state of discipline.” If it had not been for the Bureau, he added, “I feel confident there would have been an uprising upon the part of the negroes.”116

  Established to ease the ex-slaves’ transition to freedom, the Freedmen’s Bureau ultimately facilitated the restoration of black labor to the control of those who had previously owned them. “They are, in fact, the planter’s guards, and nothing else,” the New Orleans Tribune concluded, almost two years after expressing its initial doubts about the Bureau. “Every person acquainted with the regime of our country parishes knows what has become of the Bureau’s agencies and the Agents.” The potential for a different course of action had been present from the outset. Although the President’s liberal pardon policy necessarily frustrated any radical redistribution of land, the Freedmen’s
Bureau had been in a position to effect significant changes in labor relations, particularly during the chaotic aftermath of emancipation. “In my opinion,” a Bureau official wrote from Meridian, Mississippi, in June 1866, “you could inflict no more severe punishment on a planter than to take from him the negroes that work the place. They will do anything, rather than this, that is possible or reasonable. They feel their utter helplessness without them to do the work.” But even the best-intentioned of the commissioners and local agents manifested their sympathy for the freedmen in curious and contradictory ways, embracing a paternalism and a contract labor system that could only perpetuate the economic dependency of the great mass of former slaves.117

  “Philanthropists,” a black newspaper observed in 1865, “are sometimes a strange class of people; they love their fellow man, but these to be worthy of their assistance, must be of an inferior kind. We were and still are oppressed; we are not demoralized criminals.” Nor did black people need to be reminded to avoid idleness and vagrancy; the repeated warnings, preached by native whites and Federal authorities alike, were all too reminiscent of the white preacher’s sermons during slavery. After all, the newspaper concluded, “the necessity of working is perfectly understood by men who have worked all their lives.”118

  Chapter Eight

  BACK TO WORK: THE NEW DEPENDENCY

  “Now children, you don’t think white people are any better than you because they have straight hair and white faces?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great power, they formed this great government, they control this vast country.… Now what makes them different from you?”