by H. W. Brands
A visitor to the South observed that times had changed since the days of slavery, but more for the masters than for the slaves. “Although the former owner has lost his individual right of property in the former slaves,” he said, “the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.”22
BOOKER WASHINGTON MET capitalism at the mouth of a West Virginia salt mine. After the war he moved with his mother and brother to Malden, where his stepfather and other former slaves dug salt from the ground and refined it for household and industrial use. Booker earned his first wages working at the mine’s furnace, which boiled water away from the salt. He didn’t like the work and was happy to leave it for school when the local community of freedmen hired a teacher to impart basic literacy to young and old. But Booker didn’t stay in school long: his stepfather determined that the family couldn’t spare his lost wages and called the boy back to the furnace. As he grew older and stronger he graduated to the coal mine next door that supplied the fuel to the furnace. The pay was better but the job was hard, dirty, and dangerous. “There was always the danger of being blown to pieces by a premature explosion of powder, or of being crushed by falling slate,” he remembered. “Accidents from one or the other of these causes were frequently occurring, and this kept me in constant fear.” It also kept him on the constant lookout for an escape from the mine.23
One day he overheard two miners talking about a fancy school for blacks in Virginia. “This was the first time that I had ever heard anything about any kind of school or college that was more pretentious than the little coloured school in our town. In the darkness of the mine I noiselessly crept as close as I could to the two men who were talking. I heard one tell the other that not only was the school established for the members of my race, but that opportunities were provided by which poor but worthy students could work out all or a part of the cost of board, and at the same time be taught some trade or industry.” He eventually caught the name of the school, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. “I resolved at once to go to that school, although I had no idea where it was, or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach it.”
He worked a few months more in the mine, steeling his nerve and saving what he could of his pay. Finally he made his escape, with the clothes on his back, a few items in a cheap satchel, and a kiss from his mother. Washington had discovered that Hampton was about eighty miles southeast of Richmond, and about five hundred miles from Malden. He rode a stage coach part of the way, the only black passenger among several whites. They were civil enough, but the white landlord of the hotel where the stage stopped for the night refused him food and lodging. “This was my first experience in finding out what the colour of my skin meant,” he recalled. In particular it meant he spent the night cold and hungry, walking about to keep warm amid the mountains.
When his money ran out he walked and hitched rides with friendly farmers. In time he reached Richmond, exhausted, famished, and dirty. “I had never been in a large city, and this added to my misery.… I had not a single acquaintance in the place, and, being unused to city ways, I did not know where to go. I applied at several places for lodging, but they all wanted money, and that was what I did not have.… I passed by many food-stands where fried chicken and half-moon apple pies were piled high and made to present a most tempting appearance. At that time it seemed to me that I would have promised all that I expected to possess in the future to have gotten hold of one of those chicken legs or one of those pies.”24
He slept under the wooden sidewalk and next morning found work with the white captain of a boat loading pig iron on the James River. He worked days on the river and slept nights under the sidewalk, till he had saved enough for the final leg of his journey to Hampton, which he reached with fifty cents to spare.
His application interview consisted of a single task. The head teacher took him to an empty recitation room and told him to sweep it. Washington was overjoyed, for in his last months at Malden he had lived in the house of a man whose wife instructed him in the fine art of housecleaning. “I swept the recitation room three times. Then I got a dusting cloth and I dusted it four times. All the woodwork around the walls, every bench, table, and desk, I went over four times with my dusting cloth.” He moved the furniture and dusted underneath. He swept and dusted the closets. In time he told the teacher he was done. She inspected thoroughly. “She was a Yankee woman who knew just where to look for dirt. She went into the room and inspected the floor and closets; then she took her handkerchief and rubbed it on the woodwork about the walls, and over the table and benches. When she was unable to find one bit of dirt on the floor, or a particle of dust on any of the furniture, she quietly remarked, ‘I guess you will do to enter this institution.’ ”25
Hampton transformed Washington’s life. The education there was practical as well as academic. Instruction began with basic hygiene. “The use of the bath-tub and of the tooth-brush, as well as the use of sheets upon the bed, were all new to me.” Clothes had to be clean and shoes polished. Washington was one of the youngest students; his classmates included men and women of middle age, all earnestly striving to better themselves. More than a few came from circumstances even less promising than Washington’s. “Many of them had aged parents who were dependent upon them, and some of them were men who had wives whose support in some way they had to provide for.”
Washington worked as a janitor to pay his boarding expenses of ten dollars per month. But the annual tuition of seventy dollars was beyond his means. The director of the school, General Samuel Armstrong, found him a sponsor, a resident of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who supported African American education from afar and who paid Washington’s tuition. Washington borrowed books and wore hand-me-downs sent in barrels from the North.
He spent three years at Hampton, imbibing the ethos of self-help on which its educational philosophy was based. “For the first time, I learned what education was expected to do for an individual,” he wrote. “Before going there I had a good deal of the then rather prevalent idea among our people that to secure an education meant to have a good, easy time, free from all necessity for manual labour. At Hampton I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something the world wants done brings.”
He also learned that the payback from education didn’t come at once. “I was completely out of money when I graduated.”26
MONEY WAS ON every mind in the South after the war. In a school run by the Freedmen’s Bureau in Kentucky, a teacher quizzed his pupils. “Now, children,” he asked rhetorically, “you don’t think white people are any better than you because they have straight hair and white faces?”
“No, sir,” the children responded.
“No, they are no better, but they are different,” the teacher continued. “They possess great power; they formed this great government; they control this vast country.… Now what makes them different from you?”
The children replied with a unanimous shout: “Money!!”27
What the Kentucky children knew, and what Booker Washington learned at Hampton, was one of the most lasting lessons of reconstruction for the South: that money mattered as it had never mattered before. Before the war, a large segment of the Southern population—namely the four million slaves—had spent their daily lives beyond the capitalist economy. Slaves weren’t responsible for buying their food and clothing; they didn’t pay rent for their accommodations. And, needless to say, they didn’t receive wages for their work. Had Booker Washington remained a slave, he never would have learned the value of an education, or its monetary cost. Absent emancipation, those Kentucky schoolchildren would have discovered a different set of distinctions between themselves and white folks.
The extension of the capitalist economy compelled dramatic changes in mindset among the people of the South. “The old system is gone up,” an Alabama planter ac
knowledged. This man had fired his overseers. “They can’t learn to treat the freedmen like human beings,” he said. And now he lectured his black workers on the new dispensation:
Formerly, you were my slaves. You worked for me, and I provided for you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If you were sick, I had the doctor come to you. When you needed clothes, clothes were forthcoming; and you never went hungry for lack of meal and pork. You had little more responsibility than my mules.
But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the responsibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did, now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped, and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly or lazy, your wages will be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will be prosperous and respected and happy.28
Whatever the unfamiliarity of their new responsibilities, most blacks welcomed the changes, preferring the uncertain rewards of freedom to the assured oppression of slavery. As an African American minister told his Louisville flock, “It is better to work for Mr. Cash than Mr. Lash.” This minister went on to predict even better things as capitalism erased the distinctions slavery had rested on. “A black man looks better now to the white man than he used to. 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.”29
For a time the operation of Southern capitalism fulfilled the expectations of its advocates and its prospective beneficiaries. As planters scrambled to find hands to till their fields, they bid up the price of labor, putting former slaves in the unprecedented position of holding the balance of negotiating power. “They are constantly striking for higher wages,” one Georgia employer complained. “They will not stick to a contract; they are fickle; they are constantly expecting to do better; they will make a contract with me today for twelve or fifteen dollars a month, and in a few days somebody will come along and offer a dollar or two more, and they will quit me—never saying anything to me, but leave in the night and be gone.”
Blacks shared intelligence regarding pay and working conditions. “The Negroes have a kind of telegraph by which they know all about the treatment of the Negroes on the plantations for a great distance around,” a Florida planter remarked. Entire states acquired bad reputations. A Mississippi planter desperate for workers went to New Orleans and engaged a black labor contractor to find workers, offering five dollars a head. The contractor refused and said he wouldn’t send workers to Mississippi for a hundred dollars a head. “And why?” the astonished planter recounted afterward. “All because the sassy scoundrel said he didn’t like our Mississippi laws.”30
Obviously those New Orleans workers had other options. At times the competition for labor was fierce. A traveler at Natchez marveled at the way prospective employers—planters from Mississippi and Louisiana—descended upon a regiment of African American soldiers being mustered out of the Union army. “The negro was king,” he explained. “Men fawned upon him; took him to the sutler’s shop and treated him; carried pockets full of tobacco to bestow upon him; carefully explained to him the varied delights of their respective plantations. Women came too—with coach and coachmen—drove into the camp, went out among the negroes, and with sweet smiles and honeyed words sought to persuade them that such and such plantations would be the very home they were looking for.”31
The driving force of the higher returns to black labor was increased productivity. Under slavery, African Americans had no reason to work harder than was absolutely necessary, and every reason not to. Under capitalism, the incentives were reversed. The result was striking. “I never knew, during forty years of plantation life, so little sickness,” a Sea Island planter said. “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 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.”32
This, of course, was precisely how a capitalist market in labor was supposed to work, encouraging and rewarding diligence and ambition. But Southern planters hadn’t adopted the capitalist approach to labor voluntarily and, not surprisingly, they attempted to subvert it. Some simply refused to believe that blacks would respond to the kind of incentives that worked for whites. “I know the nigger,” a Mississippi planter told an official of the Freedmen’s Bureau. “The employer must have some sort of punishment. I don’t care what it is. If you’ll let me tie him up by the thumbs, or keep him on bread and water, that will do.… All I want is just to have it so that when I get the niggers on to my place, and the work is begun, they can’t sit down and look me square in the face and do nothing.”33
When it became clear that the old methods of physical coercion would not be allowed, Southern employers adopted other methods of controlling labor. The black codes placed the force of law on the side of employers, severely limiting the mobility and alternatives of blacks and hence their bargaining power. The black codes were eventually repealed as the Radical Republicans in Congress, outraged over such measures, seized control of Reconstruction; by that time Southern employers had borrowed a page—and occasionally personnel—from their capitalist colleagues in the industrial North. “I’m hiring now to a Northern man, who gives me three thousand,” a former overseer explained.
A Northern man will want to get more out of the niggers than we do. Mine said to me last night, “I want you to get the last drop of sweat and the last pound of cotton out of my niggers,” and I shall do it. I can if anybody can. There’s a heap in humbuggin’ a nigger. I worked a gang this summer, and got as much work out of ’em as I ever did. I just had my leading nigger, and I says to him, I says, “Sam, I want this yer crop out by such a time; now you go a-head, talk to the niggers, and lead ’em off right smart, and I’ll give you twenty-five dollars.” Then I got up a race, and give a few dollars to the men that picked the most cotton, till I found out the extent of what each man could pick; then I required that of him every day, or I docked his wages.34
But wage labor represented a false start in reconstructing the plantation economy. Too few planters commanded the cash to pay workers regular wages, and too many workers resisted the slavelike discipline of gang labor in the fields. After a couple of seasons of experimentation, a system emerged that solved the planters’ cash-flow problem and the workers’ problem with old-style field labor.
Sharecropping was based on a partnership of landowners and laborers in the production of cotton and other commercial crops. The owners—who might or might not live on the property, or even in the state—provided the land, seed, and tools necessary to produce a crop. The sharecroppers—who might be poor whites as well as blacks—provided labor and expertise. At the harvest the two parties divided the crop. Often the split was down the middle; sometimes the ratios differed.
Partnerships had been a feature of economic life since before the emergence of capitalism. Sometimes the partnerships were symmetric, as when several investors contributed cash toward the purchase of a cargo of trade goods to be sent to some distant market. Sometimes they were asymmetric, as when an artisan found a sponsor to stake him to a start in his craft. A characteristic of partnerships (and of the publicly traded corporations that were their successors) was the sharing of risk. If the cargo ship sank, the investors shared the loss; if the artisan attracted no business, the sponsor suffered as well. In this regard sha
recropping made eminent sense, as agriculture has often been a high-risk undertaking. If the crop thrived, owners and sharecroppers both benefited; if the crop failed (as it did every third or fourth year in the South), both bore the loss.
But though partnerships tend to align the interests of the partners, they rarely make those interests identical, and a common theme of partnerships is the effort by one or more parties to shift the risks to the others. In the case of Southern sharecropping, the landowners did most of the shifting. They persuaded state legislatures to pass crop-lien laws that gave the landowners first right to the crops. In a bad year, when revenues from the crops failed to cover an owner’s expenses, the croppers came up empty-handed. The crop-lien laws also allowed the owners to dictate which crops would be produced—commercial cotton, for example, rather than corn, which in lean times could be eaten as well as sold. The owners typically wrote contracts requiring the sharecroppers to purchase food and other provisions from the owners, at prices and interest rates set by the owners. Croppers were almost always financially unsophisticated and were frequently illiterate, which placed them at a singular disadvantage with respect to the owners, whose natural tendency was to protect themselves. Some owners were dishonest and deliberately preyed on the croppers; other owners were honest but simply ungenerous.35
Whether from law or contract, fraud or neglect, many of the sharecroppers became virtual serfs on Southern plantations. They were not chattel: they couldn’t be bought and sold. But neither were they free to come and go as they pleased. Each year they found themselves deeper in debt to the owner of the property they worked, with little choice but to work another year under the same discouraging circumstances.
