A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  There is no evidence to suggest that the refusal by so many ex-slaves to work was “racial” in the biological sense. Indeed, we will never know for sure why they chose a different kind of freedom than the one offered them by America. But what we can say is that, were it not for renegades like them, we would all be as “free” as John Freeman and his family.

  THE BRAND OF SHAME

  The leaders of Reconstruction were as united against sex as they were in favor of work. During the war, Congress established the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission to recommend what to do with the emancipated slaves. In its hearings, the commission heard from administrators of the “contraband” camps that were set up to house black refugees. Colonel William Pile, who oversaw the camp in Vicksburg, Mississippi, testified that

  one great defect in the management of the Negroes down there was, as I judged, the ignoring of the family relationship… . My judgement is that one of the first things to be done with these people, to qualify them for citizenship, for self-protection and self-support, is to impress upon them the family obligations.

  In its reports to the secretary of war, the commission upheld the dominant view among whites that blacks were uncivilized, but it also overturned the assumption that they could not become civilized. Just as it had done for whites during and after the American Revolution, the government and its allies would teach blacks to whip themselves. For the newly freed slave, “the law, in the shape of military rule, takes for him the place of his master, with this difference—that he submits to it more heartily and cheerfully, without any sense of degradation.” There was no more effective mechanism for this transformation than marriage, “the great lever by which [the freed men and women] are to be lifted up and prepared for a state of civilization.”

  Met with near unanimous endorsement among Union leaders, the commission’s recommendations were put into practice. Federal officials running the contraband camps were instructed, “Among the things to be done, to fit the freed people for a life of happiness and usefulness, it was obvious that the inculcation of right principles and practices in regard to the social relations ought to find a place.” For ex-slaves under the care of the Union government, nonmarital sexual relations were outlawed. In April 1863, John Eaton, the federal director of the camps, reported that “all entering our camps who have been living or desire to live together as husband and wife are required to be married in the proper manner… . This regulation has done much to promote the good order of the camp.” Thereafter, superintendents of the contraband camps reported that “the introduction of the rite of Christian marriage and requiring its strict observance, exerted a most wholesome influence upon the order of the camps and the conduct of the people.” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton formally endorsed Eaton’s rule and ordered Freedmen’s Bureau agents to “solemnize the rite of marriage among Freedmen.” Local administrators were ordered to coerce ex-slaves into marriage so as to bring them into civilization:

  The past marriages of freedmen, although often formally solemnized, have not been so authenticated that misconduct can be legally punished, or inheritance rightly determined. It is most urgently and plainly needful that this out growth of a by gone system should now cease. A general re-marriage (for the sake of the record) of all persons married without license, or living together without marriage should be insisted upon by employers and urged by all who have any connection with, or knowledge of such persons. They should know that, if after ample facilities have been for some time afforded, they have not conformed to this necessity of social life, they will be prosecuted and punished.

  After its establishment at the end of the war, one of the first missions of the Freedmen’s Bureau was to eliminate the sexual freedom of slaves. Just a few months after it began operations, in the summer of 1865 the bureau issued “Marriage Rules” to “aid the freedmen in properly appreciating and religiously observing the sacred obligations of the marriage state.” The rules not only granted the legal right to marry to ex-slaves but also established the rules of marriage for them (including eligibility for marriage and for divorce) and, most significantly, made marriage, like it was already for free whites, an obligation: “No Parties … will be allowed to live together as husband and wife until their marriage has been legally solemnized.”

  Ex-slaves were warned by bureau officials that “the loose ideas which have prevailed among you on this subject must cease,” and that “no race of mankind can be expected to become exalted in the scale of humanity, whose sexes, without any binding obligation, cohabit promiscuously together.” The books that were read aloud by Freedmen’s Bureau teachers to the ex-slaves were filled with attacks on nonmarital sex. “When you were slaves you ‘took up’ with each other, and were not taught what a bad thing it was to break God’s law of marriage,” intoned Plain Counsels for Freedmen. “But now you can only be sorry for the past, and begin life anew, and on a pure foundation… . God will not wink at adultery and fornication among you now.” Black women, who as slaves were not punished or shamed for nonmarital sex, received fiery warnings:

  Let it be your first aim to make of yourself a true woman. Allow no man, under any pretense, to despoil you of your virtue. The brand of shame rests upon the brow of the unchaste woman. She is hated, even by those who are as bad as she is. No man can ever love her… . If in your slave life you have been careless of your morals, now that you are free, live as becomes a free Christian woman. Stamp a lie upon the common remark, that colored women are all bad …

  Avoid the company of bad men and women. Do not go with a man who does not care for the virtue of a woman. Keep away from gamblers. Never be found in the company of a woman who cares nothing about a good name. Lewd women will lead you down quick into hell.

  Now if you wish to build upon the solid rock, to be on good terms with yourself, to be able to look every man in the face, and to have peace with your God, keep yourselves pure. Avoid all vice, and especially all those things which are forbidden by the wholesome laws of society.

  The ending of an unsatisfactory relationship among slaves did not bear the stigma that was attached to divorce among Americans, but the ex-slaves were told to never leave their spouses. As John Freeman told Clarissa on their day of liberation, “White folks always gets married with the book and the minister and a heap of ceremony like, and the man says yes, and the woman says yes, and they vows it before the Lord, and then they live together, and nothing can ever separate them. Now, let’s you and I do that way, and begin all over new, like free folks.”

  As with the work ethic, many ex-slaves willfully—even eagerly—adopted the new sexual ethic. Thousands of freed men and women rushed to get married after the war, and countless, perfectly respectable black families emerged across the nation. Black political leaders and ministers uniformly endorsed the new rules. One minister counseled his people, “[l]et us do nothing to rekindle the slumbering fires of prejudice between the two races. Remember, we are on trial before the tribunal of the nation and of the world, that it may be known … whether we are worthy to be a free, self-governing people.”

  But despite the incessant moralizing by their leaders and protectors, many of the freedmen maintained their own ideas about marriage, relationships, and sex. Agent reports flooded into bureau offices complaining that the freed men and women persisted in “the disgusting practice of living together as man and wife without proper marriage,” “living together and calling themselves man and wife as long as it conveniently suits them,” and maintaining bigamous or adulterous relationships. In “many instances,” wrote one agent, “where after being legally and lawfully married they live together but a short time. Separate and marry again or live together without any obligation at all.” Time and again, the agents complained that blacks continued to “act as they did in time of slavery,” clinging to “old habits of an immoral character.” They could barely contain their frustration with the continued practice of “taking up” with a person without a lifetime commitment. “It would
appear to be more difficult to change their ideas in this matter than on any other affecting their welfare,” wrote Alvan Gillem, who headed the bureau in Mississippi, in 1868.

  Freedmen’s Bureau agents frequently reported their dismay with the manner in which freed people ignored the requirements of the law, even when they were fully aware of its technical demands. A local agent in Mississippi wrote in 1867 that he would

  hear of men leaving their wives and running away with other women to parts unknown and some women leaving their husbands, taking up with other men. I feel confident these acts are not done through ignorance of the law in such cases, but more from the want of a will to comply with the law. I have explained the law to them with reference to adultery etc. but without much avail.

  Another bureau officer could scarcely believe that many freedmen considered having more than one sexual partner to be “a right which no one has a right to interfere with.” Chaplain C. W. Buckley, the assistant superintendent of freedmen in Montgomery, Alabama, reported that he was “pained daily” by the sexual relations among ex-slaves: “Husbands & wifes [sic] are separating at a fearful rate and ‘taking up’ with other persons. Not infrequently a man is living with two or three wifes. Though this has been the custom of the race and habit of the country for years, yet it cannot be looked upon in any light than a huge system of prostitution by sane persons.” But coercion had only a limited effect on people who did not want to live like the Freemans. The Virginia assistant commissioner reported, despite the bureau’s massive efforts to domesticate the freedmen, “indifference and repugnance of the Negro to registering in reference to marriage, for both men and women still have an aptitude for change of their marriage relations, and their animal propensities are so strong that they heed not the consequences of the change.” To be sure, many freed people searched for spouses who had been taken from them by sale, but “many Freedmen,” as one bureau official observed, “now take advantage of their freedom to get rid of their Old Wives, and allege as a reason that they were not ‘married by the Book.’” One Virginia officer said it all when he reported that many ex-slaves were displeased with legal marriage, “think[ing] their liberties very much curtailed by their freedom.”

  Frustrated bureau agents successfully lobbied Southern state legislators to legally mandate marriage for black couples. Many of the states’ “civil rights” laws passed during Reconstruction included what legal historian Katherine Franke has called “the automatic marriage statute.” The Mississippi civil rights law, passed in 1865, contained the standard language: “All freedmen, 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.” Freedmen’s Bureau agents monitored the living and sexual arrangements of ex-slaves and turned in alleged adulterers, bigamists, and fornicators to local authorities for prosecution under local criminal laws. Gillem asked law enforcement officials in Mississippi to jail ex-slaves who engaged in “deplorable” activities. He explained to the Washington bureau office in September 1868 that “I have caused the proper steps to be taken to bring this matter before the Civil Courts and shall urge that offenders be brought to trial and punished.” After all, Gillem maintained, the purpose of the bureau’s marriage rules was “to enforce matrimony between tens of thousands of freedpeople.” One woman, when asked why she had legally married a man she already considered to be her husband when they were slaves, explained, “they were arresting people that did not have a ceremony between them.”

  As with white citizens in the early republic, new black citizens after the Civil War were suddenly punished for producing children out of wedlock. Thousands of black unmarried mothers and fathers were arrested, fined, imprisoned, or suspended by their thumbs. Countless black children were labeled “bastards,” placed in orphanages, and made wards of the state. This was an entirely new punishment for people who, when they were in a state of what was called bondage, thought nothing was shameful or “illegitimate” about unmarried parents.

  WHITE RECONSTRUCTION

  Moral rules for white Americans during Reconstruction were no less severe. White children were pummeled by moral injunctions to work. The most widely used schoolbook in the mid-nineteenth century, McGuffey’s Reader, taught children to read with stories and poems such as “Lazy Ned,” about a boy who “would never take the pains / To seek the prize that labor gains, / Until the time had passed; / For, all his life, he dreaded still / The silly bugbear of up hill, / And died a dunce at last.” McGuffey’s stories also warned its young readers to shun the choices of the “idle school boy” who “was indolent about every thing” and now “goes about the streets, begging his bread” and the laggard who ended up “despised by everyone … a poor wanderer, without money and without friends.” Such tales were intended to instruct American children “how sinful and ruinous it is to be idle” and to create a culture in which work was a constant, haunting presence:

  The idle boy is almost invariably poor and miserable; the industrious boy is happy and prosperous. But perhaps some child who reads this, asks, ‘Does God notice little children in school?’ He certainly does. And if you are not diligent in the improvement of your time, it is one of the surest evidences that your heart is not right with God. You are placed in this world to improve your time. In youth, you must be preparing for future usefulness. And if you do not improve the advantages you enjoy, you sin against your Maker.

  A poem featured in a popular school reader for girls, “Exhortation to Diligence,” was typically morbid: “Toil, and be glad! Let Industry inspire / Into your quickened limbs her buoyant breath! / Who does not act, is dead; absorbed entire / In miry sloth, no pride, no joy he hath; O leaden-hearted men, to be in love with death!”

  Moral commands to labor continued to rain down on Americans in adulthood. Abraham Lincoln, like virtually all political leaders in the period, demonstrated the effects of this. On the eve of the Civil War, he wrote to a friend, “Work, work, work, is the main thing.” In 1876, as Reconstruction neared its end and a depression crippled much of Northern industry, Washington Gladden, who was both a leader of the Freedmen’s education movement and a leading proponent of labor reform in the North, authored a book of friendly advice to the (white) working man that was virtually identical to the freedmen’s textbooks. “Shovel dirt, saw wood, do any kind of reputable work, rather than abide in idleness,” Gladden counseled. “The only relief for our present distresses will come through industry and frugality; through a chastening of our ambitious notions of life, and the cultivation of simpler tastes and a more contented spirit.” In 1878 an employer of shoemakers in Massachusetts voiced the general view when he defended the maintenance of ten- and eleven-hour work days by claiming, “Nothing saves men from debauchery and crime so much as labor, and that, till one is tired and ready to return to the domestic joys and duties of home.” Leaders of government widely agreed with this assessment, as did the Ohio Bureau of Labor in 1879: “Labor is not a curse; it is not the hours per day that a person works that breaks him down, but the hours spent in dissipation.” Give men “plenty to do, and a long while to do it in, and you will find them physically and morally better.”

  QUITTING TIME

  Black people weren’t the only Americans who violated the rules of Reconstruction. For one thing, they did not have a monopoly on shiftlessness. Though many white Americans had made themselves into the hardest workers in the world, fortunately, great numbers had been ignoring and resisting the work ethic since the Revolution. When the first factories were built, with their regimented work rules and long hours, many of the white people employed in them proved to be terrible workers. Among the very first factories built in the United States were the Hamilton Company mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, which employed only women. Within two years of the company’s founding in 1825, more than half its work force had been fired for the following reasons:

  6 were discharged for misconduct

  5 were disc
harged for mutiny

  3 were discharged for disobedience to orders

  1 was discharged for impudence to the overseer

  1 was discharged for levity

  1 would not do her duty

  5 were discharged for lying, misrepresentation, or circulating false stories

  1 was discharged for captiousness

  1 ran away

  1 was hysterical

  1 had written after her name emphatically “regularly discharged forever”

  Cobblers in the first shoe factories in Lynn, Massachusetts stopped work for games, political debates, to hear one another read from a newspaper, and to shuffle off to the grog shop. A factory superintendent in Chicopee, Massachusetts, complained of “[t]he general indisposition” of his employees “to work steady.”

  Informal renegade behaviors often created enormous margins of freedom in people’s lives. The men who built barrels—one of the major industries of the early American economy—were normally paid for six days of work, but on Saturday they began drinking beer in the morning, then would “sit around upturned barrels playing poker,” and generally “lounged about” until they received their weekly pay. According to a historian of the industry, the partying continued into the evening as “Saturday night was a big night for the old-time cooper… . Usually the good time continued over into Sunday, so that on the following day he usually was not in the best of condition to settle down to the regular day’s work.” Therefore, “Blue Monday” was spent doing very little and was “more or less lost as far as production was concerned.” Simply by being lazy, the coopers made for themselves a three-day weekend.