Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  “MONEY.” (Unanimous shout)

  “Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get money?”

  “Got it off us, stole it off we all!”

  —FREEDMEN SCHOOL, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, 18661

  You know it is better to work for Mr. Cash than Mr. Lash. A black man looks better now to the white than he used to do. He looks taller, brighter, and more like a man. The more money you make, the lighter your skin will be. The more land and houses you get, the straighter your hair will be.

  —REV. HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET,

  AT THE CENTER STREET METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY, SEPTEMBER 20, 18652

  ON A PLANTATION in South Carolina, an elderly black woman known as Aunt Phillis told how her master had built his new house only a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Like those slaves who habitually boasted of the wealth of their “white folks,” she dwelled on the fact that her master had paid a great deal of money for this house, as much as $20,000. “Where did your master get so much money?” a northern journalist asked the old woman. The question obviously agitated her. Although confined to bed because of an illness, she managed to raise herself up and with considerable excitement in her voice she kept repeating the question: “Whar he git he money? Whar he git he money? Is dat what you ask—whar he git he money? I show you, massa.” Pushing up her sleeve, she revealed a gaunt, skinny arm. Tapping it vigorously with her forefinger, she exclaimed, “You see dat, massa? Dat’s whar he got he money—out o’ dat black skin he got he money.”3

  Few ex-slaveholders ever paused to scrutinize their own lives and dependency, and still fewer would have perceived any reason to do so. But their former slaves had been quite observant, and no one knew their “white folks” better than they did. “Oh, massa ain’t old as me,” an elderly black woman explained. “Us been playfellows togedder. But massa ain’t stan’ lika me, ma’am. Hard work an’ beatin’ about make us grow ole too fast. Us been ole w’en him young. Massa lib soft w’en us lib hard.” Wherever the freedmen turned, it seemed, white men who claimed to be their best friends and emancipators were on hand to advise them to work diligently and thereby prove themselves fit for freedom. The former slaves usually listened politely and nodded their heads in acquiescence. But occasionally their anger surfaced, and few charges infuriated them more than that of idleness, particularly when their former masters leveled the accusation. “They take all our labor for their own use and get rich on it and then say we are lazy and can’t take care of ourselves,” was the way a South Carolina freedman expressed his rage. Why should the ex-slave have to prove himself, others asked, when the evidence of his labor was everywhere to be seen? Indeed, if the freedman needed only to work to prove himself fit to enjoy the blessings of liberty, he should have been free for more than two centuries. After observing how “the flippant class that talks so loud of the idleness of the negro” finds itself unable to do anything without him, the New Orleans Tribune reminded the planters: “The time has come when the cash, and not the lash commands labor. The blacks are no longer required to rise at four and work, work, work all day, till it is too dark to see; and then get up frequently during the night to wait upon the caprices of an indolent master or mistress to whom surfeiting forbids sleep.”4

  Having been exposed to regular dosages of advice from white men, more than five hundred freedmen on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, listened with particular attentiveness when Major Martin R. Delany, the outspoken black nationalist and abolitionist who returned to his native South as a Freedmen’s Bureau officer, addressed them in the summer of 1865. “I want to tell you one thing,” he began. “Do you know that if it was not for the black man this war never would have been brought to a close with success to the Union, and the liberty of your race? I want you to understand that. Do you know it? Do you know it? Do you know it?” Cries of “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” greeted his question. With the crowd obviously in his grasp, shouting out their encouragement and approval, Delany assailed the southern planters and northern speculators who exploited their labor, and he urged them to be skeptical even of those who claimed to be their best friends—the schoolteachers and ministers, “because they never tell you the truth,” and the cotton agents, “who come honey mouthed unto you, their only intent being to make profit by your inexperience.” With even greater forcefulness, however, Delany reminded his audience of the heritage of bondage, the white man’s indebtedness to their labor, and the power they held in their hands.

  People say that you are too lazy to work, that you have not the intelligence to get on for yourselves. They have often told you, Sam, you lazy nigger, you don’t earn your salt.… He never earned a single dollar in his life. You men and women, every one of you around me, made thousands and thousands of dollars. Only you were the means for your master to lead the idle and inglorious life, and to give his children the education which he denied to you for fear you may awake to conscience. If I look around me, I tell you, all the houses on this Island and in Beaufort, they are all familiar to my eye, they are the same structures which I have met with in Africa. They have all been made by the Negroes, you can see it by their rude exterior. I tell you they (White men) cannot teach you anything, and they could not make them because they have not the brain to do it.…

  Now I look around me and I notice a man, bare footed covered with rags and dirt. Now I ask, what is that man doing, for whom is he working. I hear that he works for 30 cents a day. I tell you that must not be. That would be cursed slavery over again.… I tell you slavery is over, and shall never return again. We have now 200,000 of our men well drilled in arms and used to warfare, and I tell you it is with you and them that slavery shall not come back again, and if you are determined it will not return again.

  The few local whites who were present, according to one witness, listened to Delany “with horror depicted in their faces.” No less alarmed were two Freedmen’s Bureau officers who had been dispatched to the scene to impart their impressions of this most recent addition to their ranks. If Delany’s words disturbed them, the crowd’s reaction seemed even more portentous. “The excitement with the congregation was immense,” one officer noted, “groups were formed talking over what they have heard, and ever and anon cheers were given to some particular sentences of the speech”; he overheard one freedman remark that Delany was “the only man who ever told them the truth,” while others vowed “they would get rid of the Yankee employer.” Little wonder that the officers dutifully reported the contents of Delany’s speech to their superior with a warning that such “discourse” produced “discontent among the Freedmen,” generated “feelings of indignation toward the white people,” and could only incite the ex-slaves to insurrection. “My opinion of the whole affair,” one of them concluded, “is, that Major Delany is a thorough hater of the White race, and tries the colored people unnecessarily.”5

  To judge the freedmen by their actions, on St. Helena Island and elsewhere in the South, Martin Delany had articulated feelings that were only beginning to surface in the negotiations over the terms of free labor. Neither Delany nor the host of Bureau officers and missionaries who had descended upon the South were in any real position to do for the freedman what he would have to do for himself—that is, work out some kind of arrangement with the former masters that would be commensurate with his new legal status and his aspirations. Even with the presence of Federal authorities, whose attitudes varied enormously, the ultimate settlement—barring any redistribution of land—would have to be made between those who worked and those who owned the land and the tools. And, as a black newspaper in Georgia observed, “no man loves work naturally. Interest or necessity induces him to labor. If the laborer has no inducement to be faithful, he should not be censured for neglect.… Why does the white man labor? That he may acquire property and the means of purchasing the comforts and luxuries of life. The colored man will labor for the same reason.”6

  Actually, despite the gloomy talk and predict
ions, there was never really any question about whether the freedmen would work. Unlike many of their former masters, they had never known anything but work, and most of them did not view this as a question at all. From the moment of their emancipation, the bulk of the ex-slave population had little choice but to labor for old and new employers under a variety of arrangements. Some of the very planters who forecast the Negro’s doom were successfully using free black labor; indeed, a Virginia planter seemed stunned and almost indignant that his blacks were working with a diligence they had denied him when they were his slaves. The son of a former slaveholder on the Sea Islands made the same observation when he returned in 1863 and began to cultivate the plantation with the newly freed blacks. The acknowledgment of their freedom and the promise of compensation appeared to be sufficient inducement.

  I never knew, during forty years of plantation life, so little sickness. Formerly, every man had a fever of some kind; and now the veriest old cripple, who did nothing under secesh rule, will row a boat three nights in succession to Edisto, or will pick up the corn about the corn-house. There are twenty people whom I know who were considered worn out and too old to work under the slave system, who are now working cotton, as well as their two acres of provisions; and their crops look very well. I have an old woman who has taken six tasks (that is, an acre and a half) of cotton, and last year she would do nothing.7

  Although obviously searching for evidence of black industry, sympathetic northern observers did not have to fabricate their reports. The evidence was all around them, not only in the fields but in the towns and cities, where blacks were most prominently employed in the reconstruction of a war-ravaged South. Watching the rebuilding of the burned-out district of Richmond, a traveler came away impressed with the fact that black men comprised a majority of the workers. “They drove the teams, made the mortar, carried the hods, excavated the old cellars or dug new ones, and, sitting down amid the ruins, broke the mortar from the old bricks and put them up in neat piles ready for use. There were also colored masons and carpenters employed on the new buildings.” And yet, he reflected, despite such scenes, “I was once more informed by a cynical citizen that the negro, now that he was free, would rob, steal, or starve, before he would work.”8

  If the Negro existed only to make cotton, sugar, and rice, as so many whites professed to believe, that would have sentenced to immediate oblivion thousands of skilled black workers and artisans, as well as the far larger number of menial laborers who performed the arduous tasks shunned by white people. In the skilled trades, the principal questions revolved not around the black man’s willingness to work or his ability but how much longer he would be permitted to compete with white artisans and mechanics and the degree to which his compensation permitted him to support himself. “By de time I pays ten dollars a month rent fo’ my house, an’ fifteen cents a poun’ for beef or fresh po’k, or thirty cents fo’ bacon, an’ den buys my clo’es, I doesn’t hab much leff,” a hod carrier in Selma, Alabama, declared. “I’s done tried it, an’ I knows brack man cant stan’ dat.” Nor did black workers in a Richmond tobacco factory, engaged in labor that white men rejected as too difficult, fare much better.

  We the Tobacco mechanicks of this city and Manchester is worked to great disadvantage.… They say we will starve through laziness that is not so. But it is true we will starve at our present wages. They say we will steal we can say for ourselves we had rather work for our living give us a Chance. We are Compeled to work for them at low wages and pay high Rents and make $5 per week and sometimes les. And paying $18 or 20 per month Rent. It is impossible to feed ourselves and family—starvation is Cirten unies a change is brought about.

  That constant advice to work or starve, which their white “friends” so freely imparted, never seemed to anticipate the plight of people who did little more than work and yet stood on the brink of starvation. “I keeps on washin for em,” remarked a laundress in Richmond, who spent most of her day stooped over a washtub, “for if I leave em they’ll never pay me what they owe me.”9

  On the plantations and farms, where the bulk of black laborers still resided, the issue was not whether the freedmen would work but rather for whom, at what rates, and under what conditions, and those were different questions altogether, requiring answers from a class of Southerners who had little experience in dealing with such matters. “Can a planter be expected to treat the laborers under his control in any other way to-day than he has treated them for the last twenty years?” the New Orleans Tribune asked. “He and they are the same men, in the same place, bearing to each other, in all respects, the same apparent relations. No visible change has passed off between them. The Proclamation of Emancipation did not invest the slave with a physical sign of freedom. It was a metaphysical endowment.”10 But if the relationship between “master” and laborer remained essentially unaltered by emancipation, so did the mutual dependency upon which it had always rested, and that raised the most crucial question of all. Could the former slave transform the white man’s dependence on him into a formidable weapon with which to expand his personal autonomy, improve his day-to-day life and his prospects for the future, and thereby redefine if not sever altogether the old relationship? Whatever the degree of success attained toward these ends, the effort itself marked a significant break with the past.

  2

  WHEN WILLIAM ELLIOTT tried to persuade Jacob to work for him, he ran into unexpected difficulties. As his slave, Jacob had served him faithfully over many years, and Elliott, a South Carolina planter, wished not only to retain a valuable laborer but to have him use his influence to convince the other blacks to return to work. Before he would agree to terms, however, Jacob demanded certain concessions—like the right to keep the provisions he made for himself—that would have lessened his dependency on the old master. He asked for them, moreover, in consideration of his previous record of service to the family. To Elliott, that might have suggested a demand for retroactive compensation, and he viewed the question quite differently than his former slave. “I told him I thought the obligation lay the other way. He is eaten up with self-esteem & selfishness.”11

  If the incident be judged by the content of the postwar debate, William Elliott clearly had the advantage. Although dispossessed slaveholders thought themselves entitled to compensation for their losses (President Lincoln had once proposed it as a way to encourage voluntary emancipation), the question of remunerating the slaves for past labor never reached the level of serious consideration. But if the freedmen were not to be paid for their work as slaves, and few of them ever pressed the matter, they could be quite adamant about being paid for any future labor. As slaves, each of them had borne a price tag; as free men and women, they now felt entitled to wages or crop shares commensurate with the labor they performed. To settle for anything less was to compromise their freedom.

  During the Civil War, often at the first sighting of Yankee troops, slaves refused to work without some form of compensation. What a Louisiana overseer described in 1863 as “a state of mutiny” on a neighboring plantation proved to be the failure of the blacks to report to the fields one morning; instead, they appeared before the overseer and insisted they would no longer work without pay. At the same time, the workers on a South Carolina plantation turned down the wage offer of their master. “I mean to own my own manhood,” one of them explained, “and I’m goin’ on to my own land, just as soon as when I git dis crop in, an’ I don’t desire for to make any change until den.” Besides, he added, “I’m not goin’ to work for any man for any such price [25 cents a day].” That was how the others felt, too, as a fellow laborer quickly indicated: “I won’t work for no Man for 25 cents a day—not dis chile—unless he gib me my rations too!”12

  Even while their legal status remained clouded, newly freed slaves articulated their dissatisfaction with the past by conditioning any future labor on the fulfillment of certain immediate demands, such as payment in good wages (not in worthless Confederate bills), ade
quate food and clothing, additional time off for meals and holidays, and the abolition of gang labor and the position of overseer. If the employer expected his free laborers to demonstrate that habitual deference and compliance, he might find himself deeply disappointed if not at times outraged. Early in 1864, for example, a planter in Louisiana addressed a group of prospective field hands in the hope of hiring them. “All listened attentively,” noted a reporter present at the scene, “and there was no stupidity apparent in their faces. They seemed to hear every adjective.” After listening to the explanation of terms, the laborers countered with questions which revealed their most immediate concerns: “When will our wages be paid?” “What clothing are we to have?” “What land are we allowed?” “Can we keep our pigs?” The women insisted they would no longer work on Saturdays; the men indicated their unwillingness to perform any plantation chores on Sunday. Finally, the planter asked them to raise their hands if they agreed to the terms. At first, a number of them, including most of the women, refused to do so, holding out for a five-day week, but they finally assented on condition they could work less than the full time.13

  The initial give-and-take between planters and laborers in wartime Louisiana impressed a northern observer for the ways in which the blacks were rapidly learning their own power and worth. “They have a mine of strategy,” he reported, “to which the planter sooner or later yields.” He cited the example of a planter who had hired a new overseer; the choice proved to be obnoxious to the blacks because of his reputation for wielding the whip and using abusive language in addressing black women. When a delegation of field hands demanded the overseer’s dismissal, the planter refused in the strongest possible language. After vowing that he would hire anyone he chose to be overseer, he ordered the hands back to work. Rather than return to the fields, however, the blacks went to their cabins, packed up their belongings, and started down the road; they had not gone far before the owner called them back and promised them a voice in the selection of a new overseer.14