The only real question among some blacks was not whether the lands belonging to the former slaveholders would be divided and distributed, but when and how. Freedmen in South Carolina heard that the large plantations along the coast were to be distributed. Equally persistent reports suggested that the lands on which the ex-slaves were working would be divided among them. Few blacks in Mississippi, a Bureau officer reported in November 1865, expressed any interest in hiring themselves out for the next year. “Nearly all of them have heard, that at Christmas, Government is going to take the planters’ lands and other property from them, and give it to the colored people, and that, in this way they are going to begin to farm on their own account.” In a Virginia community, the freedmen had reportedly deposited their savings with “responsible” persons so as to be in the most advantageous position to purchase lots of “de confiscated land, as soon as de Gov’ment ready to sell it.” And in Georgia a black laborer was so certain that he “coolly” offered to sell to his former master the share of the plantation he expected to receive “after the division.”27
Although confident of retaining their lands, planters expressed growing concern over the extent to which the freedmen’s aspirations interfered with the normalization of agricultural operations. It proved difficult to raise crops when laborers went about “stuffed with the idea of proprietorship” and the anticipation of soon becoming their own employers. “You cannot beat into their thick skulls that the land & every thing else does not belong to them,” a South Carolina planter wrote his daughter. Since many whites refused to believe their blacks capable of formulating perceptions of freedom, they blamed the land mania on “fanatical abolitionists,” incendiary preachers, and the Yankee invaders. But those who had overheard the “curious” wartime discussions in which the blacks apportioned the lands among themselves knew better, as did the victims of black expropriation. Where planters had fled, abandoning their properties, the freed slaves had in numerous instances seized control and they gave little indication after the war of yielding their authority to the returning owners. Along the Savannah River, blacks under the leadership of Abalod Shigg seized two major plantations on the assumption that they were entitled to “forty acres and a mule.” Federal troops had to be called in to dislodge them. Elsewhere, similar seizures revealed the intensity of black feelings about the land and created a volatile situation that many native whites and Federal officials feared might erupt into armed confrontations.28
As if to confirm black land aspirations, the Federal government adopted an ambitious settlement program in direct response to the thousands of unwanted and burdensome freed slaves who had attached themselves to the Union Army in the wake of General Sherman’s march to the sea. On January 12, 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton conferred with twenty black ministers and church officers in Savannah to ascertain what could be done about these people. The delegation suggested that land was the key to black freedom. “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it, and make it our own,” the spokesmen for the group declared. Several days later, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, a far-reaching document that set aside for the exclusive use of the freedmen a strip of coastal land abandoned by Confederate owners between Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida, granting black settlers “possessory titles” to forty-acre lots. Although intended only to deal with a specific military and refugee problem, the order encouraged the growing impression among the freedmen that their Yankee liberators intended to provide them with an essential undergirding for their emancipation. That impression gained still further credence when Congress made the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau the custodian of all abandoned and confiscated land (largely the lands seized for nonpayment of the direct Federal tax or belonging to disloyal planters who had fled); ex-slaves and loyal Unionists could pre-empt forty-acre lots, rent them at nominal rates for three years, and purchase them within that period at a fair price (about sixteen times the annual rent). If the Bureau had implemented this provision, and if blacks had been able to accumulate the necessary funds, some 20,000 black families would have been provided with the means for becoming self-sustaining farmers.29
To apportion the large landed estates among those who worked them and who had already expended years of uncompensated toil made such eminent sense to the ex-slave that he could not easily dismiss this aspiration as but another “exaggerated” or “absurd” view of freedom. “My master has had me ever since I was seven years old, and never give me nothing,” observed a twenty-one-year-old laborer in Richmond. “I worked for him twelve years, and I think something is due me.” Expecting nothing from his old master, he now trusted the government to do “something for us.” The day a South Carolina rice planter anticipated trouble was when one of his field hands told him that “the land ought to belong to the man who (alone) could work it,” not to those who “sit in the house” and profit by the labor of others. Such sentiments easily translated into the most American of aspirations. “All I wants is to git to own fo’ or five acres ob land, dat I can build me a little house on and call my home,” a Mississippi black explained. With the acquisition of land, the ex-slave viewed himself entering the mainstream of American life, cultivating his own farm and raising the crops with which to sustain himself and his family. That was the way to respectability in an agricultural society, and the freedman insisted that a plot of land was all he required to lift himself up: “Gib us our own land and we take care ourselves; but widout land, de ole massas can hire us or starve us, as dey please.” And what better way to confirm their emancipation than to own the very land on which they had been working and which they had made productive and valuable by their own labor.30
The expectation of “forty acres and a mule” may have been sheer delusion, but the freedmen had sufficient reason to think otherwise. Since the outbreak of the war, many of them had overheard their masters talk in fearful tones about how the Yankees, if successful, would divide up the land among the blacks. The Freedmen’s Bureau, in fact, blamed the false expectations of land on Confederate slaveholders who had exploited the fear of confiscation during the war to arouse propertied whites to greater exertions and sacrifices. The deception was deliberately cultivated in some instances by planters who were determined to keep their ex-slaves until the postwar crops had been harvested; at least, numerous disappointed freedmen recalled how they had been assured the Federal government would grant them plots of land after the completion of the agricultural season. When the Yankees finally arrived, they reinforced the land fever by assuring the freed slaves of their right to forty acres and a mule. When a Union soldier asked him if he had ever been whipped, West Turner of Virginia recalled, he had replied, “Yessir, boss, gimme thirty and nine any ole time.” Upon hearing this, the soldier advised him to take one acre of land for each time he had been whipped and an extra acre as a bonus. “So I measure off best I could forty acres of dat corn field an’ staked it out. De Yanks give all Fayette Jackson’s land away to de Negroes an plenty mo’ other Secesh land. But when Marse Jackson come back, we had to give it all up.”31
Although they might have had good reason to doubt the word of their masters and even the white Yankee troops, some freedmen claimed to have heard the same promises repeated by their own leaders. The fleeing slaves who boarded the Union gunboats on the Combahee River heard the reassuring refrain with which the much-idolized Harriet Tubman welcomed them:
Of all the whole creation in the East or in the West,
The glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best.
Come along! Come along! don’t be alarmed,
Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.
Still further encouragement came from black soldiers and black missionaries, who sought to prepare their people for the responsibilities they would soon assume and placed particular emphasis on the imminent division of the lands. “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now,” a black preacher in Florida told an assemblage of fi
eld hands. “He ain’t got nuthin’ lef’ but his lan’, an’ de lan’ won’t be his’n long, fur de Guverment is gwine ter gie ter ev’ry Nigger forty acres of lan’ an’ a mule.”32
Within the first two years after the war, freedmen who embraced and acted upon the expectation of “forty acres and a mule” learned soon enough to face up to the possibility of disappointment. When some former Alabama slaves staked off the land they had been working and claimed it as their own, the owner quickly set matters straight: “Listen, niggers, what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. You are just as free as I and the missus, but don’t go foolin’ around my land.” Of course, planters derived considerable comfort from the knowledge that Federal officials were prepared to confirm their property rights. Until the blacks acknowledged the futility of land expectations, the Freedmen’s Bureau recognized how difficult it would be to stabilize agricultural operations. With that sense of priorities, the Bureau instructed its agents to do everything in their power to disabuse the ex-slaves of any lingering illusions about taking over their masters’ lands. “This was the first difficulty that the Officers of the Bureau had to contend with,” a Mississippi officer wrote, “and nothing but their efforts and explanations, kept off the storm. Even now, it is but a temporary settlement.” If the blacks refused to believe their old masters, Bureau agents were quite prepared to visit the plantations in person and impart the necessary confirmation: “The government owns no lands in this State. It therefore can give away none. Freedmen can obtain farms with the money which they have earned by their labor. Every one, therefore, shall work diligently, and carefully save his wages, till he may be able to buy land and possess his own home.” The blacks he encountered held so tenaciously to their illusions, a Bureau officer in Alabama observed, that “unless they see me and hear me refute the story, they persist in the belief.” Still other officers reported that the freedmen refused to believe them, too, or thought the question of land might be negotiable. After being told of the government’s policy, a Virginia freedman offered to lower his expectations to a single acre of land—“ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s house sets on.”33
As an alternative to confiscation, Freedmen’s Bureau officers and northern white missionaries and teachers advanced the classic midnineteenth-century self-help ideology and implored the newly freed slaves to heed its lessons. Rather than entertain notions of government bounties, they should cultivate habits of frugality, temperance, honesty, and hard work; if they did so, they might not only accumulate the savings to purchase land but would derive greater personal satisfaction from having earned it in this manner. Almost identical advice permeated the editorials of black newspapers, the speeches of black leaders, and the resolutions adopted by black meetings. “Let us go to work faithfully for whoever pays fairly, until we ourselves shall become employers and planters,” the Black Republican, a New Orleans newspaper, editorialized in its first issue. With an even finer grasp of American values, a black Charlestonian thought economic success capable of overriding the remaining vestiges of racial slavery. “This is the panacea which will heal all the maladies of a Negrophobia type. Let colored men simply do as anybody else in business does, be self-reliant, industrious, producers of the staples for market and merchandise, and he will have no more trouble on account of his complexion, than the white men have about the color of their hair or beards.”34
To provide proper models for their people, black newspapers featured examples of self-made freedmen who had managed to accumulate land and were forming the nucleus of a propertied and entrepreneurial class in the South. Actually, a number of blacks had done precisely that, some of them fortunate enough to have purchased tax lands and still others who had taken advantage of the Homestead Act or who had made enough money to purchase a plot in their old neighborhoods.35 But the number of propertied blacks remained small, and some of these found they had been defrauded by whites who had an equal appreciation of the self-help philosophy and made the most of it.36 Even the blacks who obtained legitimate title to lands soon discovered the elusive quality of economic success. The land often turned out to be of an inferior quality, the freedman usually lacked the capital and credit to develop it properly, and he might consequently find himself enmeshed in the very web of indebtedness and dependency he had sought to escape. By the acquisition of land, he hardly avoided the same problems plaguing so many white farmers.37
No matter what the freedmen were told or what precepts they were admonished to follow, the belief in some form of land redistribution demonstrated a remarkable vitality. The wartime precedents and promises were apt to speak louder in some regions than the insistent postwar denials. Thousands of ex-slaves had been placed on forty-acre tracts under Sherman’s program, the earlier experiments at Davis Bend and on the Sea Islands persisted into 1865, and the stories of individual and collective success by the black settlers who worked these lands would seem to have assured the continuation and expansion of such projects. But even if few blacks elsewhere in the South knew of them, even if still fewer were aware of the congressional debate on Thaddeus Stevens’ ambitious land confiscation program or of the immense generosity of the Federal government in awarding millions of acres to railroad corporations, the idea of “forty acres and a mule” simply made too much sense and had become too firmly entrenched in the minds of too many freedmen for it to be given up at the first words of a Bureau underling. Nor could the thousands of ex-slaves on abandoned and confiscated lands in 1865 understand that the Federal policies which made their settlement possible had not been long-term commitments but rather temporary military expedients, designed to keep them working on the plantations and away from the cities and the Union Army camps.
Resilient though they were, the hopes of the freedmen could withstand only so many shocks. When the governor of Florida told them, “The President will not give you one foot of land, nor a mule, nor a hog, nor a cow, nor even a knife or fork or spoon,” he could be dismissed as a mouthpiece of planters who stood to lose the most from a confiscation scheme. When a Bureau officer told some Georgia blacks essentially the same thing, one disbelieving freedman remarked, “Dat’s no Yank; dat just some reb dey dressed in blue clothes and brought him here to lie to us.” But the denials began to assume a substance that could no longer be ignored. On May 29, 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his Proclamation of Amnesty, whereby most former Confederates were to be pardoned and recover any of their lands which might have been confiscated or occupied. That had to be taken seriously—as seriously as the Federal officers who now prepared to implement the order. In some communities, the news coincided with a rumor, said to have been circulated by planters, that the President had revoked the Emancipation Proclamation. To many freedmen, contemplating what would happen to the lands they had worked and expected to own, that was no rumor at all. “Amnesty for the persons, no amnesty for the property,” the New Orleans Tribune cried. “It is enough for the republic to spare the life of the rebels—without restoring to them their plantations and palaces.” Under Johnson’s magnanimous pardoning policy, any faint hope of a land division collapsed, along with the promising wartime precedents. Rather than confirm the settlers in possession of the land they had cultivated and on which they had erected their homes, the government now proposed to return the plantations to those for whom they had previously labored as slaves. Not satisfied with having their lands returned, some of the owners displayed their own brands of “insolence” and “ingratitude” by claiming damages for any alterations made by the black settlers and by suing them for “back rents” for the use of the land.38
The freedmen found themselves incredulous at this apparent betrayal of expectations and trust. At first, some of them could not believe or fully grasp the implications of the restoration. When a Bureau officer addressed the freedmen in one South Carolina community, the blacks came in their best clothes and in high spirits, obviously expecting a very different kind of announcement. “If the general don’t tell them cuf
fees they’re to have their share o’ our land and hosses and everything else,” a local planter warned, “you’ll see a hell of a row today.” No “row” took place but the faces of the assembled freedmen, after being told there would be no land division, said it all. The more Federal officers tried to explain and defend the decision, the less sense it made to the black audiences and the less able they were to contain their rage. “Damn such freedom as that,” a Georgia black declared after a Bureau agent had addressed them.39
Where substantial numbers of freedmen had settled on abandoned lands, as in the Sea Islands, the disappointment was bound to be felt most keenly. Appreciating that fact, General O. O. Howard, who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau and may have been second only to Lincoln in the esteem of the ex-slaves, decided to pay a personal visit to Edisto Island to inform the settlers that they must give up the lands they had been cultivating as their own. Perhaps only Howard could possibly make them believe it. As if to prepare the assemblage for the ordeal ahead, he thought it might be appropriate for them to begin the meeting with a song. Suddenly an old woman on the edge of the crowd began to sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” and the entire throng of more than two thousand soon joined in a resounding chorus. Whether it was the song, the look of dismay on their faces, or the shouts of “No! No!” that greeted his announcement, Howard found himself so flustered that he could barely finish his speech. But he had nevertheless articulated the government’s position. They should lay aside any bitter feelings they harbored for their former masters and contract to work for them. By working for wages or shares, he assured them, they would be achieving the same ends as possession of the soil would have given them. If the freedmen found Howard’s advice incomprehensible, that was only because they understood him all too clearly.40
Been in the Storm So Long Page 65