Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  Blow ye the trumpet, blow!

  The gladly solemn sound.

  The entire throng then joined in the singing, reaching a loud crescendo as they came to the refrain:

  The year of jubilee has come,

  Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.97

  With the speeches and songs of Emancipation Day still ringing in their ears, the blacks returned to their respective places and prepared to work the fields of the white man for still another year.

  8

  LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after dismissing the talk of insurrection as the product of white hysteria, the Reverend Samuel A. Agnew found the laborers on his father’s plantation in Mississippi to be “disobedient, idle and puffed up with an idea of their own excellence.” After receiving their shares from the sale of the crops, the blacks were “disinclined” to commit their entire time for still another year. “They have exalted ideas,” Agnew wrote in disgust. On the several plantations in Louisiana managed by Wilmer Shields, the laborers held back on signing a new contract and refused to reveal their intentions. When they assembled one Sunday “to express themselves” on the matter, Shields thought their propositions “too absurd and inadmissible to be repeated.” Although Adele Allston had managed to repossess her plantations earlier that year, the approach of December found her pessimistic about future prospects. No matter what she said or did, it all seemed in vain. None of the blacks wished to contract for another year, and even Milly, a servant who had been with her for many years, “is tired being good and faithful. She appears discontented. It seems to me she wants the whole of the stock, the profits of it at least.” Upon investigating conditions in the South Carolina low country, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent found the planters “uniformly ready and anxious” to contract but the freedmen almost all refused, except “upon such terms as the Bureau cannot justly require” of the employers.98

  With the completion of the crops, the labor system seemed destined each year to undergo a new series of convulsions, many of them precipitated by those persistent visions of land distribution, independent farming, and higher wages. Although the ultimately compelling need to test the boundaries of freedom surfaced at different times for different blacks, it continually frustrated any regularization of labor relations. Thousands of freedmen, including many who had stayed on with their old masters after emancipation, would now seek places elsewhere, leaving “in squads of five or ten at a time” and sometimes in sufficient numbers to render entire plantations and farms devoid of laborers. Such movements, for example, virtually sealed the fate of the rice industry in South Carolina.99 The familiar refrain “Every Negro has left us” once again punctuated the letters, private journals, and conversations of the former slaveholding class. The element of surprise seemed less pronounced now in view of the shared experiences of so many white families, though many who had survived the wartime and post-emancipation departures were to awaken one morning to find none of their laborers and servants present. On the Pine Hill plantation in Florida, Christmas had been a traditionally festive occasion, involving considerable interchange between the white and black families. But in 1865 the white family sensed a difference. When the blacks came to the Big House to pick up their gifts, they did so with little of the old enthusiasm, and, uncharacteristically, they quickly returned to their quarters. On the surface, at least, the plantation appeared to be peaceful, free of the fears of insurrection that had unsettled other regions, and the servants had performed their duties faithfully. “Adeline cooked us an elegant Christmas dinner and Bill served it to perfection. Each man and maid were in place, attending to their various duties, but the atmosphere of merriment and good-will was lacking.” Within the month, Adeline and Bill, along with the other blacks, departed, leaving the white folks “all alone on the hill.”100

  The need to break away from the places where they had served as slaves still had a way of overcoming specific economic considerations. Nevertheless, disillusionment over the paltry rewards of the first years of free labor added considerable impetus to the desire for some kind of change. “We worked hard for two years and didn’t make nothing by contracts,” a black family in Georgia declared; “we are now gwine to try it ourselves.” And like a growing number of ex-slaves, they had resolved to improve their situation by moving into town. “Even the cornfield negro has a great dislike to go into the field,” a white physician in Atlanta, Georgia, observed in early 1866; “he wants to get into the towns and do little errands and jobs. They have, as a class, a great thirst for the towns and cities; they like company; they are very social creatures—like to job about during the day, and be where they can go to a party at night.” The principal attractions of the city remained the greater feeling of security it afforded and the chances for more remunerative employment and a more active social life. Even if the freedman did not move into an urban center, he often preferred to contract on a plantation nearby, so as to be in a position to enjoy the advantages of a town while still performing the kind of labor he knew best. After an unsuccessful attempt to hire laborers in Vicksburg, a Mississippi planter conceded his problems might have been minimal if he could have picked up his plantation and moved it closer to the city. Still another disappointed employer came away convinced “the black rascals wouldn’t trust themselves the width of my plantation away from town for fear I would eat ’em up.”101

  Whether the freedman moved or not, the end of each agricultural season set off a new round of contract talks, invariably preceded by an employer’s complaint that his hands “positively” refused to agree to terms. During the negotiations, employers would learn soon enough how successfully they had placated their working force over the past year; indeed, that was precisely why these annual talks took on such importance for the freedmen, not only as a way to better their terms but for the rare opportunity it afforded them to express their grievances and suggest how conditions might be improved. In settling the accounts with the laborers on the Butler plantations, Frances Leigh had learned not to respond to their exclamations of doubt and disapproval. But when it came to negotiating a new contract with them, she discovered that they would not be put off so easily. This time they insisted upon being heard, and Frances Leigh had little choice but to listen.

  For six mortal hours I sat in the office without once leaving my chair, while the people poured in and poured out, each one with long explanations, objections, and demonstrations. I saw that even those who came fully intending to sign would have their say, so after interrupting one man and having him say gravely, “ ’Top, missus, don’t cut my discourse,” I sat in a state of dogged patience and let everyone have his talk out, reading the contract over and over again as each one asked for it, answering their many questions and meeting their many objections as best I could. One wanted this altered in the contract, and another that. One was willing to work in the mill but not in the field. Several would not agree to sign unless I promised to give them the whole of Saturday for a holiday. Others … would “work for me till they died,” but would put their hand to no paper. And so it went on all day, each one “making me sensible,” as he called it.

  Through it all, she remained “immovable,” insisting that they agree to the contract as it stood. On the first day, she managed to sign sixty-two of the field hands—“good work,” she thought, “though I had a violent attack of hysterics afterwards, from fatigue and excitement.” Only once did she lose her composure and that was when a freedman, “after showing decided signs of insolence,” finally declared, “Well, you sign my paper first, and then I’ll sign yours.” She ordered him off the plantation, only to have him return minutes later “with a broad grin on his face” and prepared to sign the contract. After several days of negotiation, she claimed to have broken “the backbone of the opposition,” and all but two of the laborers went back to work under the new contract; one left from “imagined ill-health” and the other she dismissed for “insubordination.”102

  The economic necessity which forced planters to bargain
with their former slaves did not make the experience any less demeaning or exasperating. A Louisiana planter confided to his diary how he had “purposely” stayed away from the sugar house “to avoid talking to the negroes about a contract before I was ready to make one.” When he finally did so, he found the final terms to be “distasteful” but unavoidable. “Every body else in the neighborhood has agreed to pay the same and mine would listen to nothing else.” The task of having to deal with their former slaves at the bargaining table could be further aggravated by the obvious delight the laborers derived from the proceedings and the breakdown in the traditional forms of deference. When Daniel Hey ward, the South Carolina planter, met with his blacks, the word soon got around that they had been “kind enough but spoke to him sitting, and with their hats on.” Not only did they seem “confounded and incredulous as to his ownership of the land” but they shook their heads when he suggested they work in much the same way as they had before emancipation. “Oh no, neva work as they did,” they replied, “and no overseer and no drivers.” Upon hearing this story, an acquaintance of the Heyward family expressed no surprise: “Now all this strikes me as being exactly what was to be expected. That feeling of security and independence has to be eradicated; and if it should survive after January [1866], I think with proper management it will be effectually extirpated before we wish to put seed in the ground in March or April.”103

  Employers evinced the most resistance to precisely those demands—less supervision, more free time, and the opportunity to lease lands—that might ultimately lead to a greater measure of independence and self-reliance for their black workers. To the freedmen, these issues naturally took on added significance with each new contract year, reflecting their discouragement over the most recent settlement, the failure of their land aspirations, and their precarious economic position. If planters grew to fear that crop shares, as a substitute for cash wages, compromised the proper relationship between themselves and the laborers, growing numbers of freedmen turned to that form of compensation as affording them an enhanced feeling of independence. After charging that indebtedness now characterized the monthly wage system, the black newspaper in South Carolina advised agricultural laborers to work the land on shares or leases and thereby “retrieve the mistakes of the past season.” About the same time, late in 1865, on a cotton plantation near Beaufort, the freedmen countered the planter’s wage offer by demanding half the crop instead. Upon being turned down, they appealed to the local Union commander, who advised them to agree to the employer’s fair offer. Still refusing to concede anything, the laborers crowded around the planter when he visited their quarters, shouting their demand for “half the crop.” With the planting season about to begin and the freedmen refusing to sign the contract, Federal troops were dispatched to remove the rebellious blacks from the plantation and make room for more compliant workers. The show of force and the threat to displace them from their jobs broke the resistance effectively, and the laborers reluctantly gave up their fight for a share of the crop.104

  The questions of greater independence, more free time, and less supervision proved to be inseparable. After the first agricultural season, planters and Freedmen’s Bureau agents noted the persistence with which blacks refused to labor on Saturday for anyone but themselves, preferring to tend their own garden plots or to sell in town some of the produce they had raised. “Five days I’ll work,” a Mississippi field hand insisted, in refusing to sign a new contract, “but I works for no man on Saturday.” If he worked on Saturday, another freedman told his employer, he expected additional compensation. On Johns Island, the issue even assumed religious proportions in May 1866 when an elderly black woman claimed a revelation from heaven forbidding work on Fridays and Saturdays; many of the freedmen hailed the revelation as “God’s truth” and ceased to work on those days until Federal authorities threatened to intervene and drive the blacks off the island. The way in which some planters and freedmen finally resolved this demand was to compromise in favor of half a day’s work on Saturday or to excuse one member of a family, usually the wife or oldest daughter, on Saturday afternoon so that she could attend to domestic duties. The idea of a five-day workweek, like the share system, imparted to many freedmen a greater feeling of independence even as their economic situation remained the same, and for some it reflected a growing assumption that they were perfectly capable of managing agricultural operations without white interference. On plantations where overseers had been retained, for example, the objections were directed not so much to the quality of the individual hired to fill that position, which had once been the principal issue, but to supervision by any white man. “Some of the best hands told me,” a Bureau officer reported from Mississippi in 1866, “ ‘they would not have a superintendent to direct them as they knew how to do the work as well as any white man.’ ” More than a year later, after investigating labor troubles on several Louisiana plantations, a Bureau officer thought the freedmen were “greatly to blame, as they would not, as a general rule, be dictated to either by their employers or their agents; in fact, they will not have a white man dictate to them.”105

  The refusal to sign a contract was the freedman’s principal bargaining weapon and he could wield it but once a year. The longer he held out, the later the planting season began, and many laborers obviously hoped to use such leverage to exact the desired concessions. If the planter remained unyielding, he would have to face the arduous and urgent task of hiring new laborers, and in some instances the replacements would come onto plantations littered with the charred remains of what had once been the farm buildings. If the evicted blacks could no longer use the facilities, nobody else would. Shortly after a planter in South Carolina ousted the laborers for their refusal to work, the house in which he and his sons were living suddenly erupted into flames; several nights later, he bent down to pick something up “just in time to escape a whistling bullet.” On still other plantations, after being ordered to leave for refusal to sign contracts, black laborers burned down the employer’s house and entrenched themselves in their quarters. Little wonder that a planter should have advised his colleagues to use “forbearance and management” in dealing with their laborers, for “a recourse to other means may cause the buildings to be laid in ashes, as was the case in my late brother’s place near Mobile, Alabama.”106

  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.

  Metcalfe I hear is making efforts to get a very large force, offering inducement, with plenty of whiskey and every latitude & liberty to do as they please if they work for him. And Hutchins tampers with our Negroes and those who left us …, offering to furnish mules, utensils and all plantation gear & tools for half the cotton made. I mention only two.

  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 prepa
red 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.”107

  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.”108