Part Two
Chapter 5
Booker T. Washington never forgot the moment of his emancipation. “Freedom was in the air, and had been for months,” he wrote later. Washington was a boy of five or six—like many slaves, he didn’t know precisely when he had been born—and was living on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, as the Union army approached. “Deserting soldiers returning to their homes were to be seen every day. Others who had been discharged, or whose regiments had been paroled, were constantly passing near our place. The ‘grape-vine telegraph’ was kept busy night and day. The news and mutterings of great events were swiftly carried from one plantation to another.” The anticipation increased, and acquired a distinctive tone.
As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. True, they had sung those same verses before, but they had been careful to explain that the “freedom” in these songs referred to the next world, and had no connection with life in this world. Now they gradually threw off the mask, and were not afraid to let it be known that the “freedom” in their songs meant freedom of the body in this world.
The night before the eventful day, word was sent to the slave quarters to the effect that something unusual was going to take place at the “big house” the next morning. There was little, if any, sleep that night. All was excitement and expectancy. Early the next morning word was sent to all the slaves, old and young, to gather at the house. In company with my mother, brother, and sister, and a large number of other slaves, I went to the master’s house.…
The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was that some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see.1
THE FIRST TASK of American democracy after the Civil War was to determine how the Union would be reconstructed. Secession and the war had upset the balance crafted and maintained during the previous several decades; to what extent the balance would be restored, and what would supplant the part of it that wasn’t, were the most obvious questions facing the federal government, the states, and the American people at the war’s end.
Had the fighting somehow ceased before 1863, political readjustments might have been the total of reconstruction. But emancipation added other, more complicated dimensions. The transformation of four million slaves into four million free men, women, and children was the most dramatic change in the history of American society. How the South and the nation as a whole would accommodate this change became the pressing issue as the war ended. Would the South and the nation move forward, toward a more comprehensive equality between blacks and whites? Or would the country accept something less, perhaps a caste-based system of peonage for African Americans? The Northern president had proclaimed emancipation in his role as commander in chief, and Northern troops enforced his proclamation as they defeated and occupied the South. But the president’s war powers would diminish with the end of the war, and the troops would eventually go home. What they would leave behind was anyone’s guess.
Inseparable from the social consequences of emancipation were the economic ramifications. Before slavery became an institution of social control, it had been a system of labor mobilization. The Southern economy in 1860 rested on the bound labor of African Americans. Emancipation compelled Southern planters and other consumers of labor in the South to find new methods of mobilizing the labor force. Many Northerners assumed that the labor system that worked in the North—the market-based exchange of labor for money—could be reproduced in the South. Most white Southerners doubted that such a system could work in Dixie or that it should if it could. As for the freed men and women, they had their own ideas, which didn’t accord neatly with the thinking of the whites of either camp.
Even as capitalism revolutionized life within the South, it transformed the role of the South in the nation at large. Until the Civil War the semifeudal Southern economy had stood apart from the rest of the national marketplace. Connections existed, of course; Southerners sent cotton north and brought manufactured goods south. But investors and especially immigrants preferred the North and the West, where the rewards to labor were more attractive and the laws of property less peculiar. The end of slavery made the South a new frontier for capitalist expansion, a frontier to be integrated, with ease or difficulty, into the booming postwar economy.
WILLIAM SHERMAN HAD been about as unradical on the race question when the war began as a man could be and not own slaves himself. He was belligerently apolitical, having conceded the political role in his family to his younger brother John, a Republican congressman from their home state of Ohio. William Sherman’s antipathy to politics reflected his belief that every issue was being reduced to what he called “the nigger question,” and he warned John to “avoid the subject as a dirty black one.” He told his foster brother Thomas Ewing (who was also his brother-in-law): “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery.… I don’t know that I would materially change the actual political relation of master and slave. Negroes in the great numbers that exist here”—Sherman happened to be writing from Louisiana—“must of necessity be slaves.”2
Sherman’s attitude was unexceptional in the North before the war, and it remained unexceptional after the fighting began. Yet it afforded Sherman’s political enemies an opening for attack, and it allowed the Radical Republicans—those members of the governing party most committed to broader rights for African Americans—to press their case at Sherman’s expense. “While almost every one is praising your great march through Georgia, and the capture of Savannah,” Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck wrote from Washington at the end of December 1864, “there is a certain class having now great influence with the President, and very probably anticipating still more on a change of cabinet, who are decidedly disposed to make a point against you.… They say that you have manifested an almost criminal dislike to the negro, and that you are not willing to carry out the wishes of the Government in regard to him, but repulse him with contempt!” The Radicals’ complaint against Sherman was that he hadn’t done enough to liberate slaves on his march across Georgia and South Carolina. Halleck said he understood why Sherman had not welcomed large numbers of fugitive slaves into his lines—“because you had not the means of supporting them, and feared they might seriously embarrass your march”—but he thought Sherman ought to know what was being said about him, and he wondered if now that Sherman had reached the coast, where supplies were no longer a problem, he might reconsider his policy.3
About this time, Sherman received a visit from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Sherman distrusted Stanton, an ally of the Radicals, as much as he distrusted most politicians (conspicuous exceptions being his brother and Lincoln). But he suppressed his suspicions and bore the visit as best he could. “Mr. Stanton seemed desirous of coming into contact with the negroes to confer with them, and he asked me to arrange an interview for him,” Sherman recounted. Sherman complied, inviting dozens of black leaders from the vicinity of Savannah, mostly Baptist and Methodist preachers, to sit down with the war secretary. Twenty appeared, and these chose Garrison Frazier as their spokesman. Stanton asked the group if they knew about the Emancipation Proclamation. Frazier said they certainly did. “All the slaves in the Southern states should be free, henceforth and forever,” he paraphrased.
Stanton asked how Frazier and the others conceived of slavery and freedom. Frazier answered, “Slavery is receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we can reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves and assist the government in maintaining our freedom.”
Stanton asked whether the blacks preferred to live among whites or by themselves. “I would prefer to live by ourselves,” Frazier said, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” But Frazier added that on this point he could speak only for himself. “I do not know that I can answer for my brethren.”
Sherman had been present at the interview till now. Stanton asked him to leave, as he wished to probe the freedmen’s opinion of the general, especially as it related to their emancipation and future condition. Sherman heard the answer later. “We looked upon General Sherman, prior to his arrival, as a man, in the providence of God, specially set apart to accomplish this work,” Frazier said. “And we unanimously felt inexpressible gratitude to him, looking upon him as a man who should be honored for the faithful performance of his duty. Some of us called upon him immediately upon his arrival, and it is probable he did not meet the secretary with more courtesy than he did us.… We have confidence in General Sherman, and think what concerns us could not be in better hands.”4
Frazier and the other black leaders shortly had their judgment confirmed. Sherman was one of the many Northerners—starting with Lincoln and running far down the chain of command—whose views on the race question changed dramatically during the course of the war. His prewar hostility to blacks had less to do with the blacks themselves than with the fact that their condition was the cause of the rupture of the Union. But once the rupture occurred, Sherman’s anger found a new target: the secessionists. And blacks became potential allies in defeating and punishing the rebels. Even more than Lincoln, Sherman viewed emancipation as an act of war. Slavery had caused the war; emancipation would help end it. Emancipation would destroy the Southern economy—more thoroughly than his own march from Atlanta to the sea had done—and would thereby terminate the ability of the South to carry on the war. And it would prevent the South from starting any more wars.
Yet for emancipation to be real, it had to be followed by measures to make the former slaves independent of their erstwhile masters. To this end Sherman issued an order in January 1865 that had enormous symbolic impact and made him the improbable embodiment of Radical Reconstruction. “The islands from Charleston south,” Special Field Order 15 stated, “the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. John’s River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.” The order continued: “On the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority, and the acts of Congress.” On the lands reserved to the freedmen, heads of families might claim parcels as their own. “Each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres.”5
Sherman later directed that confiscated mules be made available to the black settlers. Special Order 15, together with this decision, became the basis for the slogan “Forty acres and a mule” that served as a beacon to black hopes and the battle cry of the Radical Reconstructionists. In the process it confirmed Sherman’s reputation among Southern whites as the devil incarnate.
GERTRUDE THOMAS WAS among those who uttered a prophylactic prayer when they heard Sherman’s name. The daughter of one Georgia planter and the wife of another, Gertrude Thomas was living in Augusta when Sherman’s army swept through and wreaked havoc on her family’s property. She seethed with indignation at Sherman’s violation of the accepted rules of warfare, and in her anger she imagined herself writing a letter to Ellen Sherman, the general’s wife. A message from Mrs. Sherman to her husband had found its way into Southern papers recently, and it provided the literary stimulus to Gertrude Thomas’s response.
Mrs. General Sherman.… I, a rebel lady, will give you some information with regard to General Sherman’s movements. Last week your husband’s army found me in the possession of wealth. Tonight our plantations are a scene of ruin and desolation. You bade him “God speed” on his fiendish errand, did you not? You thought it a gallant deed to come amongst us where by his own confession he expected to find “only the shadow of an army.” A brave act to frighten women and children! desolate homes, violate the sanctity of firesides and cause the “widow and orphan to curse Sherman for the cause.” And this you did for what? To elevate the Negro race.
Mrs. Sherman must know what the elevation of the Negro entailed.
Enquire of General Sherman when next you see him who has been elevated to fill your place. You doubtless read with a smile of approbation of the delightfully fragrant ball at which he made his debut in Atlanta? Did he tell you of the Mulatto girl for whose safety he was so much concerned that she was returned to Nashville when he commenced his vandal march? This girl was spoken of by the Negroes whom you are willing to trust so implicitly as “Sherman’s wife.”
Rest satisfied, Mrs. Sherman, and quiet the apprehension of your Northern sisters with regard to the elevation of the Negroes. Your husbands are amongst a coloured race whose reputation for morality has never been of the highest order. And these gallant cavaliers are most of them provided with “a companion du voyage.”
Perhaps Mrs. Sherman felt sorry for those whose homes and lives her husband wrecked. She shouldn’t bother.
As your brave husband considers a southern lady a fair object to wage war against, and as I do not yet feel fully satisfied that there is no danger of a clutch from his heavy hand upon my shoulders, I will only add that, intensely Southern woman that I am, I pity you.6
Gertrude Thomas did not mail this letter. Even if postal operations hadn’t been disrupted by the war, she was too much the gentlewoman to intrude on another gentlewoman’s private life. She prided herself on the manners she had learned at the Wesleyan Female College of Macon, Georgia, and she took pains to display them as the mistress of one of Augusta’s most distinguished households.
Until Sherman brought the war to Georgia, the Thomas household had comprised Gertrude; her husband, Jefferson; their four children; and several slaves. The family property included the house in Augusta and various farms outside the town, with the many slaves that worked the farms. Sherman’s soldiers ravaged the farms and encouraged the field hands to flee. Gertrude’s situation would have been discouraging under any circumstances, but that she was pregnant again rendered her predicament even more dismaying. “I make no plans for the future,” she wrote in her journal, despite the fact that she dearly wished to know where and under what circumstances her baby would be born. “During the first months of pregnancy I am always sadly depressed, and, the body acting upon the mind, my whole nature is affected. This time I was congratulating myself that I was going through the terrible ordeal in better style, but thanks to General Sherman … my nervous system received a shock which was terrible. I was made really sick by the combined prospect of Sherman’s visit and the burning cotton.” Like most prospective mothers she looked to the time of her delivery with some trepidation. The recent events doubled her distress. “I have been so sad, unusually low spirited.… I have thought of my dying when the hour of trial comes.… If I do die, I hope that my baby will die with me.”7
The following weeks brought word of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. “The war is over, and I am glad of it,” Gertrude wrote. For many months she and her neighbors had known the South would lose; the only question was how badly. “What terms of agreement may be decided upon, I cannot say, but if anything is left us—if we can count with certainty upon enough to raise and educate our children—I shall be grateful.”
One thing was clear: the Thomas family would not be left their slaves. Gertrude and the other whites had learned of the Emancipation Proclamation at the time of its publication, but only after Union forces occupied Augusta did emancipation become real for them and their slaves—and even then not entirely so. “This morning a large force of Yankees came marching into Augusta, the drums beating and colours flying, surrounded by a large crowd of Negroes,” Gertrude wrote on May 7. She deliberately slept late in a silent attempt to snub the invaders. “I felt no particular emotion as I looked at them through the closed blinds.” She picked up the morning paper and read an order regarding labor relations under the occupation. “The impression is general that slavery is abolished, that the negroes are free.” But, surprisingly, it was only an impression.
The next day she learned a bit more of the new reality. “Mr. Thomas and I were out riding in the buggy. Pinck and Cora”—a neighbor and his wife—“in his buggy overtook us and enquired if we had seen the order from General Smith with regard to free labor, viz: that the Negroes were to be subsisted, paid six months wages in advance and half the crop made to be divided among them. Contracts to be made between negro and Planter—there, I have followed the Yankee fashion of naming the Negro first and the Master last. A failure to plant will cause the land to be confiscated.”
Gertrude Thomas felt that her world had been turned upside down. “We can count with certainty upon nothing. Our Negroes will be freed, our lands confiscated, and imagination cannot tell what is in store for us.” Yet though her husband was “utterly spirit-broken” by the recent events, Gertrude felt an odd ambivalence. “I cannot say ‘Why art thou cast down, oh my soul?’ for indeed I am not cast down. On the contrary, I am not the person to permit pecuniary loss to afflict me as long as I have health and energy. As to the emancipation of the Negroes, while there is of course a natural dislike to the loss of so much property, in my inmost soul I cannot regret it. I always felt that there was a great responsibility. It is in some degree a great relief to have this feeling removed.”
All the same, she felt no gratitude toward those who were the occasion of her relief. “For the Negroes I know that I have the kindest possible feeling,” she wrote. “For the Yankees who deprive us of them I have no use whatever.”8
AS GERTRUDE AND Jefferson Thomas learned from their neighbors, the emancipation of the slaves was wrapped closely in concern for their future subsistence and employment. Sherman’s policy of forty acres and a mule—which was applied, with modifications, in certain other parts of the South on other properties confiscated from the rebels—provided one model for the future of the former slaves. Sherman’s approach had the advantage of being self-sustaining, or at least promising to be. The former slaves possessed farming skills, honed in years of bondage but now employed on their own behalf. As property owners they would respond to, and benefit from, the same incentives that had motivated farmers in the North for generations.
But Sherman’s plan had serious drawbacks. The first was political. The Republicans were the party of free labor, but they were also a party of respect for private property, and to confiscate and redistribute large amounts of property cut against their political grain. The second drawback was constitutional. Sherman’s order could be justified as a wartime measure, but once the war ended, peacetime interpretations of the Constitution would again apply, and these didn’t appear to countenance the wholesale redistribution of land by the federal government.
The third drawback was economic. Emancipation by itself disrupted the Southern economy; if emancipation was followed by the confiscation and redistribution of land, the disruption would be many times as severe. Disruption, of course, was precisely the point of Union policies while the war lasted, but once the war ended the emphasis shifted diametrically, to reconstruction and revitalization. The most vindictive of the Radicals might be happy for the South to starve, but more responsible types recognized an obligation to rebuild the Southern economy, if only because a languishing South would burden the country as a whole. Besides, any economic policy that punished the South would almost certainly punish the freedmen the most, which hardly seemed fair.
For these reasons, the redistribution of land died aborning. The forty-acre settlers found it nearly impossible to acquire title to their plots, and as the original owners returned after the war they thrust the freedmen aside, with the help of friendly sheriffs and courts and the acquiescence of the federal government. The process took more time in some places, less in others, but within a few years of the war’s end the dream of black ownership on any but the most limited scale had vanished.9
MANY OF THE freedmen predictably felt betrayed. “We were promised homesteads by the government,” declared a delegation from Edisto Island, South Carolina, to Oliver O. Howard, a decorated Union officer who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau.
If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us … we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former. We are at the mercy of those who are combined to prevent us from getting land enough to lay our fathers’ bones upon. We have property in homes, cattle, carriages, and articles of furniture, but we are landless and homeless.… This is not the condition of really free men. You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island. You only lost your right arm in the war, and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes, who stripped and flogged my mother and sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with this price, and who combines with others to keep away land from me, well knowing I would not have anything to do with him if I had land of my own—that man, I cannot well forgive.
The government in Washington must know what its decisions entailed.
This is our home. We have made these lands what they are. We were the only true and loyal people that were found in possession of lands. We have been always ready to strike for liberty and humanity, yea to fight if need be to preserve this glorious Union. Shall not we who are freedmen and have always been true to this Union have the same rights as are enjoyed by others? Have we broken any laws of these United States? Have we forfeited our rights of property in land? If not, then are not our rights as a free people and good citizens of the United States to be considered before the rights of those who were found in rebellion against this good and just government?
Was money an issue? The freedmen could deal with that. “We are ready to pay for this land.” But they had to be given the opportunity to do so. “Will the good and just government take from us this right and make us subject to the will of those who cheated and oppressed us for many years? God forbid!”10
IF THE FREEDMEN couldn’t be landowners, then, in an agrarian economy, they had to be employees of the people who were. Historically, markets take time to develop, but the South after the Civil War was allowed almost no time to develop a market for labor. The war ended amid the spring planting season, as the need for labor was peaking. But at that very moment the slaves discovered that they no longer had to work for their old masters. Theoretically the masters might have hired their former slaves, yet in practice most lacked the money. Cash flows had typically been modest under slavery, as slave labor was a capital investment rather than an operating expense. The planters might have borrowed money to pay the former slaves, but the four years of the war had used up all the available capital, and in any event emancipation destroyed their principal form of collateral, the market value of their slaves. Nor would land, the basis for borrowing by Northern farmers, be worth anything to speak of until the labor question was answered.
During that first season the labor system evolved haphazardly. Where freedmen retained their forty acres they worked for themselves. In the rare cases where the former masters had sufficient reserves to pay their former slaves, they often tried to do so. Many of Gertrude and Jefferson Thomas’s field hands had fled for freedom upon Sherman’s approach, but the house slaves remained, and the Thomases hoped to keep them on. “This morning Mr. Thomas assembled the servants together, told them that numerous reports were about town, that it was extremely probable that the Yankees would free them,” Gertrude wrote on May 8. Jefferson Thomas said he wished to hire them. “He would have to hire someone, and had as soon pay them wages as anyone else, and advised them to wait quietly and see what could be done.” The offer appeared to elicit general acceptance. “I have seen no evidence of insubordination,” Gertrude remarked. “On the contrary, they all worked very cheerfully.… Since his explanation there has appeared a more cheerful spirit than ever.”
Yet attitudes changed as the new reality sank in. One of the former house slaves, a man named Daniel, abruptly departed. “Took off all of his clothes during the night and left without saying anything to anyone,” Gertrude wrote. She felt betrayed. “He is here in town, but I have not seen him nor do I wish to do so. If he returns to the yard, he shall not enter it.” The next day another slave left. “Betsey, a little servant, went for the Chronicle as she was in the habit of doing every day, and did not return.… I was really annoyed about it.” Gertrude discovered that Betsey had rejoined her mother, whom Jefferson Thomas had sold earlier on suspicion of stealing food from the storeroom. Gertrude thought the departure was Betsey’s loss. “She was a bright, quick child, and raised in our family would have become a good servant. As it is, she will be under her mother’s influence and run wild in the street.” Within two weeks more, nearly the entire staff of the house had melted away. “Out of all our old house servants, not one remains except Patsey and a little boy, Frank.”11
J. T. TROWBRIDGE was a journalist and author who traveled through the South during the year after Appomattox. His first impression of what he called “the desolated states” was that they were indeed in a desolated state. The countryside bore deep scars of the fighting, but the cities showed the damage most starkly. “Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar and misery,” he wrote of Atlanta. “Hundreds of the inhabitants, white and black, rendered homeless by the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels, which made the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of gypsies or Indians. Some of the negro huts were covered entirely with ragged fragments of tin-roofing from the burnt government and railroad buildings. Others were constructed partly of these irregular blackened patches, and partly of old boards, with roofs of huge, warped, slouching shreds of tin, kept from blowing away by stones placed on the top.” Sherman had wanted to cripple Southern commerce and industry, and by the evidence of Atlanta he had succeeded. “Every business block in Atlanta was burned, except one. The railroad machine-shops, the foundries, the immense rolling-mill, the tent, pistol, gun-carriage, shot-and-shell factories, and storehouses, of the late Confederacy, disappeared in flames and explosions. Half a mile of the principal street was destroyed.”12
But life went on, haltingly. Shop owners sifted through the rubble; planters returned to their farms. Shortages of all sorts—building materials, capital, transportation—plagued the reconstruction efforts. Yet one question hung over everything. Trowbridge heard it from a dozen mouths; it took unspoken shape in the very air: “Will the freedmen work?”
The answers depended on who was speaking. Colonel Samuel Thomas of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mississippi was hopeful. Thomas had charge of efforts to place black farmers on lands abandoned by their owners. “I am confident there is no more industrious class of people anywhere than the freedmen who have little homesteads of their own,” he said. “The colonies under my charge, working lands assigned them by the government, have raised this year ten thousand bales of cotton, besides corn and vegetables for their subsistence until another harvest.”
Other officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau concurred, as did many—but, interestingly, not all—of the freedmen themselves. Trowbridge toured Vicksburg with the Union commander of the Department of Mississippi, Major General Thomas J. Wood. They visited the freedmen’s quarter below the center of town and together inquired what portion of the former slaves would work, and what portion would try to live without working. “We got very candid replies: the common opinion being that about five out of twenty still had a notion of living without work.” Trowbridge added, perhaps with a smile, “Not one would admit that he was one of the five—every man and woman acknowledged that labor was a universal duty and necessity.”13
The shiftless five—if that was indeed their number—could cite reasons for not working. An informant explained to Trowbridge the employment practices of a white landowning neighbor. “He goes by the name of ‘Honest M—’ all through the country,” Trowbridge explained, adding parenthetically, “I omit names, for he”—Trowbridge’s source—“told me that not only his property but his life depended upon the good-will of his neighbors.” Trowbridge continued, of “Honest M”:
Honesty appeared to be a virtue to be exercised only towards white people; it was too good to be thrown away on niggers. This M has four hundred sheep, seventy milch cows, fifteen horses, ten mules, and forty hogs, all of which were saved from the Yankees when they raided through the country, by an old negro who run them off across a swamp. Honest M has never given that negro five cents. Another of his slaves had a cow of his own from which he raised a fine pair of oxen; Honest M lays claim to those oxen and sells them. A slave-woman that belonged to him had a cow she had raised from a calf; Honest M takes that, and adds it to his herd. He promised his niggers a share of the crops this year; but he has sold the cotton, and locked up the corn, and never given one of them a dollar. And all this time he thinks he is honest; he thinks Northern capitalists treat free laborers this way.
Trowbridge’s informant was a Northerner who had come south seeking opportunity after the war (which was another reason he had to be careful of his neighbors’ opinions). He had rented one of M’s two plantations, as M lacked the capital to run both himself. “But he gave me notice at the start that he should take all the niggers from my plantation, and that I must look out for my own help.” When the Northerner, however, in company with M, went to take possession of his rented property, all the freedmen were there.
“How’s this?” he asked the owner. “I thought these people were going with you.”
M explained that he couldn’t persuade them to work for him. He said he had offered twenty-five dollars a month, plus board and medical attention, but they wouldn’t come.
The Northerner hesitantly asked if he might try to employ them. M said he was welcome to try. After M left, the Northerner called the freedmen around. He afterward told Trowbridge what happened.
Said I: “Mr. M offers you twenty-five dollars a month. That is more than I can afford to pay, and I think you’d better hire to him.” They looked stolid; they couldn’t see it; they didn’t want to work for him at any price.
Then I said, “If you won’t work for him, will you work for me?” I never saw faces light up so in my life. “Yes, master! Yes, master!” “But,” said I, “ten dollars a month is all I can afford to pay.” That made no difference, they said; they’d rather work for ten dollars, and be sure of their pay, than for twenty-five dollars, and be cheated out of it.
The Northerner concluded his story happily. “They went right to work with a will. I won’t ask men to do any better than they have been doing. They are having their Christmas frolic right now, and it’s as merry a Christmas as ever you saw!”14
ANOTHER OF TROWBRIDGE’S interviews revealed something else he considered significant about attitudes in the South. Among his interlocutors was “a very intelligent young man of Chambers County” in Alabama. This young man, the son of a planter, had fought with the Confederate army but been taken prisoner and sent to Pennsylvania. At the end of the war, having heard that everything he might have expected to own back in Alabama had been destroyed, confiscated, or stolen, he decided to stay in Pennsylvania. “I had never done a stroke of labor in my life, and it came hard to me at first. But I soon got used to it.” He worked on a farm for six dollars a month, then in a store for eighteen. He impressed his employer, who promoted him steadily till he was earning fifty dollars a month. “I had been a wild boy before the war,” he told Trowbridge. “I had plenty of money with no restrictions upon my spending it. But I tell you, I was never so happy in my life as when I was at work for my living in that store. My employer liked me, and trusted me, and I liked the people.”
In time he returned home on a visit, which was how Trowbridge came to meet him. Things weren’t going well. “My relations and neighbors are very much incensed against me because I tell them plainly what I think of the Yankees. I know now that we were all in the wrong, and that the North was right, about the war; and I tell them so. I have met with the most insulting treatment on this account. They feel the bitterest animosity against the government, and denounce and abuse the Yankees, and call me a Yankee, as the worst name they can give me.” Trowbridge asked how widespread this view was. The young man said it was overwhelming. “There are fifteen hundred voting men in the county, and all but about a hundred and eighty feel and talk the way I tell you. They can’t be reconciled.… Those who are able are preparing to emigrate. A fund has already been raised to send agents to select lands for them in Mexico.”
Trowbridge asked if the young man hadn’t encountered similar animosity in the North toward the South. He said he had, but only a little. “And there was this difference: In the North it is only a few ignorant people, of the poorer class, who hate the South. I believe the mass of the Northern people, while they hate treason and rebellion, have only kind feelings toward the Southern people. But with us it is the wealthy and influential class that hates the North, while only the poor whites and negroes have any loyalty at heart.”
An Alabama planter registered despair rather than hatred. “The country is ruined,” he told Trowbridge. “The prosperity of our people passed away with the institution of slavery. I shall never try to make another fortune. I made one, and lost it in a minute. I had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in niggers. I am now sixty years old. I’ll bet a suit of clothes against a dime, there’ll be no cotton crop raised this year.”
This man predicted that blacks would find their freedom a mixed blessing. “Some few niggers go on, and do well, just as before; but they’re might scarce.” Others, especially the aged and infirm, would long for the security of the old days, when they could count on a roof over their heads and food on their tables. Already the reaction was setting in. “A nigger drayman came to me the other day and asked me to buy him. He said, ‘I want a master. When I had a master, I had nothing to do but to eat and drink and sleep, besides my work. Now I have to work and think too.’ When I said the law wouldn’t allow me to buy him, he looked very much discouraged.” (Commenting on the exchange, Trowbridge wrote, “I heard of a few such cases as this drayman’s, but they were far less common than one would have expected.”)15
JOURDON ANDERSON HAD been the slave of Colonel P. H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee. Upon emancipation he went to Nashville before heading north for Ohio, where he received a letter from his old master. “I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon,” he responded (with the help of a literate friend), “and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can.” Jourdon said he had felt uneasy about the colonel since they had parted. “I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs.… I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.” Jourdon said he had no hard feelings, “although you shot at me twice before I left you.” He sent his regards to the whole family. “Give my love to them.… I would have come back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.”
Jourdon explained that he was prospering in Ohio. “I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children—Milly, Jane and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher.” Yet Jourdon couldn’t deny sometimes feeling homesick, and he couldn’t rule out a return to the old plantation. “If you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.”
His wife had some doubts. “Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some kind of proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly.” They had decided what sort of proof they required. “I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq., Dayton, Ohio.”
Considering the matter further, Jourdon added another request. “Please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die, if it comes to that, than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters.” And one other thing: “You will please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.”
Jourdon suspected he might not be hearing from the colonel again. So he reiterated his regards for all at the old place. “Tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this.… Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.”16
THE CONFUSION IN the labor system that first season led to the adoption of general policies in various states. These “black codes,” as they came to be called, were swiftly criticized as attempts to reimpose slavery in all but name. The criticism wasn’t wrong but was somewhat misleading. In certain respects the black codes were liberal documents, at least by contrast to what had gone before in the slave states. Because slaves were construed as property, they had lacked the most basic civil and human rights. The black codes sought to define some of these rights for the freedmen. “All freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded, in all the courts of law and equity of the State,” the Mississippi code declared. “Freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes shall be competent in civil cases, when a party or parties to the suit, either plaintiff or plaintiffs, defendant or defendants; also in cases where freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes is or are either plaintiff or plaintiffs, defendant or defendants, and a white person or white persons is or are the opposing party or parties.” The rights of the former slaves extended to criminal cases as well. “It shall be lawful for any freedman, free negro or mulatto, to charge any white person, freedman, free negro, or mulatto, by affidavit, with any criminal offense against his or her person or property, and upon such affidavit the proper process shall be issued and executed as if said affidavit was made by a white person.”
The black codes constructed family law for African Americans. “All freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes may intermarry with each other, in the same manner and under the same regulations that are provided by law for white persons,” the Mississippi code declared. “All freemen, free negroes, and mulattoes who do now and have heretofore lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes.” South Carolina was more succinct—and implicitly more eloquent in marking the difference between the era of slavery and that of freedom. “The relation of husband and wife among persons of color is established,” the South Carolina code stated. “The relation of parent and child among persons of color is recognized.”17
On these points the black codes were a signal advance for African Americans. To be able to marry and have the union recognized in law, to know that one’s children weren’t liable to be snatched away at the whim of others, were precious rights, and made all the more precious by their absence just months before. To be able to sue and testify in court, to be able to bring criminal charges against anyone, were foundation stones of participation in civil society.
Yet there was, of course, more to the black codes than empowerment of former slaves. Slavery had been a system of labor relations, but it was also a system of social control. Slavery specified what black men and women (and children) could and couldn’t do, where they could and couldn’t go, with whom they could and couldn’t associate. Many whites had difficulty imagining a society in which such controls were absent. They feared a footloose population of blacks roaming the countryside and deliberately or inadvertently fomenting trouble, from petty crimes to grand felonies. They assumed that since blacks had had to be coerced into working under slavery, they would have to be coerced into working under freedom. This was necessary for the survival of the Southern economy, which had been built on black labor, but it was also necessary for the welfare of blacks, who didn’t know enough to care for themselves.
The black codes went to great lengths to describe and proscribe vagrancy. “All persons who have not some fixed and known place of abode, and some lawful and reputable employment; those who have not some visible and known means of a fair, reputable, and honest livelihood; all common prostitutes; those who are found wandering from place to place, vending, bartering, or peddling any articles or commodities, without a license from the district judge or other proper authority; all common gamblers, persons who lead idle or disorderly lives, or keep or frequent disorderly or disreputable houses or places; those who, not having sufficient means of support, are able to work, and do not work … shall be deemed vagrants,” said South Carolina. (The proscribed vagrant class also included “fortune-tellers, sturdy beggars, common drunkards, those who hunt game of any description, or fish on the land of others,” as well as unlicensed performers of “any tragedy, interlude, comedy, farce, play, or any other similar entertainment, exhibition of the circus, sleight of hand, wax-works, or … any concert or musical entertainment.”) The definition of vagrancy applied to persons of any race, but the penalty was specified only for persons of color. That penalty was imprisonment and hard labor for up to twelve months. But partly because the lawmakers and their constituents didn’t want to pay for the upkeep of prisoners and partly because the point of the statute was to ensure a supply of workers for the farms of the South, provision was made for the privatization of punishment. “The defendant, if sentenced to hard labor, after conviction may … be hired, for such wages as can be obtained for his services, to any owner or lessee of a farm for the term of the hard labor to which he was sentenced, or be hired for the same labor on the streets, public roads, or public buildings.”18
Proscribing vagrancy was neither new nor unique to the South. Northern states had been doing it for years, and, upon the emergence of city-based manufacturing, several were stiffening their statutes. But the Southern codes went beyond outlawing vagrancy to specifying terms of employment. “Every freedman, free negro, and mulatto shall, on the second Monday of January, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and annually thereafter, have a lawful home or employment, and shall have written evidence thereof,” the Mississippi law declared. The evidence of a home should be a license or statement from a mayor or police board; the evidence of employment should be a contract. Length of service under labor contracts would be agreed upon by the employers and workers (officially styled “masters” and “servants” under South Carolina law) but would typically be a year. (“The period of service shall be expressed in the contract,” the South Carolina law said; “but if it not be expressed it shall be until the twenty-fifth day of December next after the commencement of the service.”) Failure to sign a contract would make a black person a vagrant and subject to the criminal sanctions for vagrancy. Failure to complete a signed contract would do the same and more. “If the laborer shall quit the service of the employer before expiration of his term of service, without good cause,” the Mississippi law stipulated, “he shall forfeit his wages for that year up to the time of quitting.”19
Predictably, the reaction to the black codes diverged dramatically. A North Carolina planter considered them useful guides to the self-improvement of the former slaves. “If they cannot (as they never can) occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c., 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.” Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys of Mississippi considered his state’s code humane and just. If anything, it erred on the side of liberality in the legal privileges accorded blacks. But this was a small price to pay for the greater good. “The question of admitting negro testimony for the protection of their persons and property sinks into insignificance by the side of the other great question of guarding them and the State against the evils that may arise from their sudden emancipation.” What were these evils? “The answer is patent to all—vagrancy and pauperism, and their inevitable concomitant crime and misery.”20
The former slaves took a decidedly different view. A group of Mississippi freedmen petitioned Humphreys in complaint of the code. “We do not want to be hunted by negro runners and their hounds unless we are guilty of a criminal crime,” they said. The new law would punish honest and hardworking African Americans, upon whom the future of the state depended. “If every one of us colored people were removed from the state of Mississippi, our superiors would soon find out who were their supporters. We the laborers have enriched them, and it is as much impossible for them to live without us as it is for we to be removed from them.”21
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 acknowledged. 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 sharecropping 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.